Simulation and performance evaluation of energy efficient MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), idle listening is one of the most significant sources of energy consumption. In order to limit this problem many synchronous and asynchronous approaches have been proposed. Synchronous approaches reduce the idle listening by sharing schedule information. Exchange of schedule information again results in extra overhead on energy consumption. Asynchronous approach (RI-MAC) uses receiver initiated beacon to do same. In this paper, we analyze and evaluate the performance of S-MAC and RI-MAC protocol for WSNs in two different scenarios namely Contending Flow and Data Gathering. Evaluation of these MAC protocols will be in terms of certain performance parameters, while considering energy consumption in overall period as well as in idle listening period as the major performance parameter.