Energy Conservation in Animal Tracking

Wireless animal tracking represents the process of using battery operated wireless collars or tags to monitor and track animals in the wild. Given that it is particularly difficult to tag some species, communication protocols must be designed to be energy efficient, while still ensuring a high packet delivery ratio and low delay. In this paper, we present an energy efficient cross-layer protocol for an animal tracking application. The proposed protocol, MAC-LEAP, is a MIMO based energy adaptive protocol that reduces the energy consumption of the nodes by dynamically selecting their number of antennas for communication. We evaluate this protocol in an elephant tracking application in three different scenarios; when the nodes have limited energy, when the nodes have unlimited energy; and when the tags can be recharged via energy harvesting. Our results show that MAC-LEAP outperforms traditional protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio, and average packet delay and energy consumption.