Performance evaluation of an energy-efficient medium access control protocol for wireless sensor network / Farah Diyana Zolkafli

Wireless sensor networking is an emerging technology that has a wide range of potential applications including environment monitoring, military. Such a network normally consists of a large number of distributed nodes that organize themselves into a multi-hop wireless network. Each node has one or more sensors, embedded processors and low-power radios, and is normally battery operated. Typically, these nodes coordinate to perform a common task. This project is mainly focusing on reducing the power consumption of wireless sensor network (WSN). WSN use battery-operated computing and sensing device. Usually these sensor nodes are deployed in environments where it is hard and impractical to charge or replace exhausted batteries of the nodes. Simultaneously, the sensor nodes need to operate for a significant span of time. Protocols that save more energy and at the same time comply with its computation and communication functions are desirable for wireless sensor networks. Various Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols were proposed for wireless sensor networks. S-MAC has been chosen as an energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks and has been developed by using OMNeT++. This protocol reduces energy consumption and has good collision avoidance capability. From the simulation results obtained, the network lifetime estimation has been studied under certain environment.