Quorum-Based Energy Saving MAC Protocol Design for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are mainly designed for environment surveillance where wireless sensor nodes cooperate to get their job done. Generally, wireless sensors are battery powered. Therefore, it is crucial to use sensor nodes´ battery resources efficiently. Most of the existing power saving protocols achieve power saving by putting sensor nodes to sleep periodically. Such a uniform sleep/wake up mechanism fails to adjust a sensor node´s sleep duration based on its traffic load, thus causing either lower power efficiency or higher latency. In this paper, we proposed a quorum-based MAC protocol that enables sensor nodes to sleep longer under light loads. Since traffic flows toward the sink node in wireless sensor networks, a new concept next hop group was also proposed to reduce transmission latency. Simulation results verified that the proposed QMAC saved more energy and kept the transmission latency low.