Traffic-adaptive duty cycle adaptation in TR-MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

The Medium Access Control (MAC) layer can influence the energy consumption of a wireless sensor network (WSN) to a significant level. TR-MAC is an energy-efficient preamble sampling based MAC protocol for low power WSNs suitable for low data rate and low duty cycle scenario. However, low data rate is not always maintained in wireless sensor networks which often have to deal with event-driven scenarios where a sudden event rapidly increases traffic load within the network. In this paper we propose a traffic-adaptive duty cycle adaptation mechanism in order to provide responsiveness to traffic rate variations for TR-MAC protocol. This mechanism increases throughput and decreases packet delay while maintaining energy-efficiency without any extra information exchange among the sensor nodes in the network.