A bit-map-assisted energy-efficient MAC scheme for wireless sensor networks

Low-energy characteristics of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) pose a great design challenge for MAC control design. Recent studies have proposed different intra-cluster communication bit-map-assisted (BMA) MAC protocol for large-scale cluster-based WSNs. BMA is intended for event-driven applications, where sensor nodes transmit data to the cluster head only if significant events are observed. In addition, we provide the energy and packet latency analytical models for BMA, conventional TDMA, and energy efficient TDMA (E-TDMA) when used as intra-cluster MAC schemes. Our results show that BMA is superior for the cases of low and medium traffic loads, relatively few sensor nodes per cluster, and relatively large data packet sizes. In addition, BMA performs better than the TDMA-based MAC schemes in terms of average packet latency.