Agent Based Approach to Minimize Energy Consumption for Border Nodes in Wireless Sensor Network

This paper presents an agent-based system to minimize the energy consumption for border nodes in sensor-MAC (S-MAC), a cluster based contention protocol. The S-MAC protocol is based on unique feature; it conserves battery power at nodes by powering off nodes that are not actively transmitting or receiving packets. In doing so, nodes also turn off their radios. Inspired by the energy conservation mechanism of the S-MAC, we unmitigated our efforts to augment the node life time in sensor network. Border nodes act as shared nodes between virtual clusters. Virtual clusters are formed on the basis of sleep/listen schedule of nodes. Towards this end, we propose a multi-agent system that allows nodes to join cluster where they experience minimum energy drain. This system includes two types of agents: stationary and mobile agents. A prototype implementation and simulation results compared with S-MAC are presented.