CBU-SMAC: an energy-efficient CLUSTER-BASED UNIFIED SMAC algorithm for wireless sensor networks

The Sensor Media Access Control (SMAC) protocol is a promising synchronous Low Duty Cycle (LDC) MAC protocol well-known for its periodic listen and sleep mechanism, which minimizes the high energy dissipation associated with idle listening. The use of SMAC’s periodic listen and sleep mechanism leads to a situation in which border nodes have multiple schedules, resulting in extended listening periods and increased energy consumption. Schedule Unified Algorithms (SUA) have been proposed to address border nodes’ high energy consumption by requiring nodes to adhere to a single schedule (i.e. unified schedule). SUA has been shown to decrease energy consumption, but at the cost of increased control overheads and missed event detection. This paper proposes a novel Cluster-based Unified SMAC (CBU-SMAC) algorithm that addresses the border node problem inherent in SMAC and SUA’s high control overheads and missed event detection. The CBU-SMAC algorithm is implemented in NS-3. Its performance is compared to CBU-SMAC without a sleep/wake schedule (CBU-SMAC-WS). CBU-SMAC outperformed CBU-SMAC-WS in terms of energy consumption and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), with a significant gain of 24% in energy savings and a mean of 58% in PDR.