EETA: An Energy Efficient Transmission Alignment for Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Abstract

Energy conserving MAC protocols performing adaptive duty-cycling mechanism have been widely studied to improve the energy efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In particular, several asynchronous Low Power Listening (LPL) MAC protocols such as B-MAC, X-MAC and ContikiMAC transmit a long preamble or consecutive data packets for an efficient rendezvous between senders and receivers. However, the rendezvous results in the challenging problem of unnecessary channel utilization since the senders occupy a large portion of the medium. Furthermore, when a traffic generation time overlaps with other neighbouring nodes, they frequently encounter spatially-correlated contention incurring excessive channel contention. In this paper, we propose a novel traffic distribution scheme called an Energy Efficient Transmission Alignment (EETA), that shifts a traffic generation time of the application layer. By using a MAC layer feedback including contention information, the cross-layer framework determines whether the node delays its transmission or not. EETA is robust from the heavy contending environment due to its traffic distribution feature. We evaluate the performance of EETA through diverse experiments on the TelosB platform. The results show that EETA improves the overall energy efficiency by up to 35%, and reduces the latency by up to 48% compared to the existing scheme.