A greener MAC layer protocol for smart home wireless sensor networks

The wireless sensor network (WSN) is an important element on many advanced, energy efficient data acquisition (DAQ), and control systems. Sleep/wake-up scheduling and network overhead are some of the major burdens to achieve energy efficient WSNs. In this paper, an energy efficient communication algorithm is proposed for smart home sensor networks. The proposed approach targets the wasted energy during the idle listening, collision, and overhearing processes. A three-tier Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol has been developed to minimize the total energy consumption of the network. The new protocol reduces the total energy requirement by each node, facilitates confirmed communication for steady traffic, and gives adaptive control during varying traffic load. Overall, the proposed MAC protocol shows better performance than conventional WSN protocols.