Energy analysis for the distributed receiver-based cooperative medium access control for wireless sensor networks

This paper presents the energy analysis of a new energy-efficient distributed receiver-based cooperative medium access control (MAC) scheme for wireless sensor networks. The cooperative MAC scheme developed herein incorporates cooperation, overhearing avoidance, receiver-based relay node selection and a Markov-based channel state estimation onto the standard IEEE 802.15.4 scheme. The solution is developed based on a receiver oriented approach when selecting cooperative relay nodes and using a store and forward scheme to relay the packets to the destination node. This works´ main focus is in combining the cooperative packet relaying with overhearing avoidance in order to reduce node energy consumption hence enhancing the network lifetime. As the performance criteria, the energy consumed per node is investigated against packet arrival rate and average signal-to-noise ratio. The percentage of energy consumed and packet throughput are also investigated as the proposed MAC scheme is compared against the standard IEEE 802.15.4 MAC over the estimated channel conditions. The results show that the proposed MAC scheme with cooperation and overhearing avoidance resulted in both improved performance and improved energy saving patterns.