Adaptive time division multiple access-based medium access control protocol for energy conserving and data transmission in wireless sensor networks

Traditional time division multiple access (TDMA)-based medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), for example, low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH), allocate one time slot for each node within a cluster. For nodes that have no data to send, the radio module is still active. Such approaches drain the precious battery energy. In this study, the authors propose a novel TDMA-based MAC protocol to conserve energy and increase data transmission efficiency of sensors in a cluster-based WSN. In the proposed scheme, nodes that have no data to send can go into sleep mode for energy conserving. On the other hands, nodes that have more data to send can ask the cluster head to allocate more time slots for data transmission. Experiments show that the proposed MAC protocol can have better performance than traditional TDMA-based MAC protocols.