nW-MAC: multiple wake-up provisioning in asynchronously scheduled duty cycle MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

To reduce the energy cost of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the duty cycle (i.e., periodic wake-up and sleep) concept has been used in several medium access control (MAC) protocols. Although these protocols are energy efficient, they are primarily designed for low-traffic environments and therefore sacrifice delay in order to maximize energy conservation. However, many applications having both low and high traffic demand a duty cycle MAC that is able to achieve better energy utilization with minimum energy loss ensuring delay optimization for timely and effective actions. In this paper, nW-MAC is proposed; this is an asynchronously scheduled and multiple wake-up provisioned duty cycle MAC protocol for WSNs. The nW-MAC employs an asynchronous rendezvous schedule selection technique to provision a maximum of n wake-ups in the operational cycle of a receiver. The proposed MAC is suitable to perform in both low- and high-traffic applications using a reception window-based medium access with a specific RxOp. Furthermore, per cycle multiple wake-up concept ensures optimum energy consumption and delay maintaining a higher throughput, as compare to existing mechanisms. Through analysis and simulations, we have quantified the energy-delay performance and obtained results that expose the effectiveness of nW-MAC.