An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Low Traffic Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is one of the most important requirements for wireless sensor networks. We present EMAC, an energy efficient MAC protocol for low-traffic delay-tolerant wireless sensor networks. EMAC uses asynchronous distributed transmission scheduling to achieve high energy efficiency. It was developed following strict design guides and keeping focus on meeting all requirements of MAC protocols designed for wireless sensor networks. It was implemented using TinyOS. Real world measurements of EMAC running on Crossbow´s mica² motes were done, and are compared to S-MAC and B-MAC. A performance comparison shows that EMAC performs best in terms of energy efficiency. Furthermore, EMACS shows good balance of energy consumption between source and destination nodes.