An Novel Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol Based on Collision Avoidance for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have been widely used in many important areas. Medium access control (MAC) protocols have a significant effect on the function and performance of sensor network. .This paper summarizes the present design paradigms of the MAC protocol in wireless sensor networks, then based on ring topology based on virtual grid and token ring ideas, an novel energy-efficient MAC protocol based on collision avoidance (EECA-MAC)for wireless sensor networks is proposed. Comparing with other algorithms, EECA-MAC has two obvious features: Firstly, it improves energy utility by changing the activity of wireless communication module of sensor nodes, energy model and state transition of sensor nodes. Secondly, EECA-MAC adopts ring topology based on virtual grid intra-cluster and time slot ideas to avoid collision intra-cluster. Simulation results show that, compared with TDMA and SMAC, EECA-MAC significantly reduce in energy consumption and prolong the network lifetime.