International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Survey (IJCSES) Vol.2, No.

3, August 2011

ENERGY EFFICIENT MAC PROTOCOLS FOR

WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS: A SURVEY
Bhavana Narain, Anuradha Sharma, Sanjay Kumar and Vinod Patle

SoS in CS & IT, Pt. Ravishankar Shukla University, Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India
{narainbhawna, anuradha.shinestar, sanraipur, patlevinod}@gmail.com

Abstract
Use of Wireless sensor networks have been widely seen in the fields of target detection and tracking,
environmental monitoring, industrial process monitoring, and tactical systems.In wireless sensor
networks nodes work with a incomplete power source, energy efficient operations in an important factor
of the nodes in wireless sensor network. Energy conservation plays important role in different layers of
the TCP/IP protocol suit, and for MAC layer it is the effective part. Therefore, to work in wireless
communicating sensors network, we use MAC protocol which improve energy efficiency by increasing
sleep duration, decreasing idle listening and overhearing, and eliminating hidden terminal problem or
collision of packets. In this paper First section we describe the accessible energy efficient MAC
protocols for sensor networks their energy saving method. In Second section we discuss the architecture
of same protocols and then compare same protocols depending on their Advantages and Disadvantages.

Keywords
Wireless sensor Network, Mac protocol, Energy.

1. INTRODUCTION
Now a days intrusion detection, defense, climate control, medical systems ,environment
monitoring, robotic exploration, smart spaces, disaster management, target tracking, wildlife
habitat monitoring, scientific application, are uses the Wireless Sensor Network. The Wireless
sensor networks are made up of one or more battery-operated sensor devices with embedded
processor, small memory and low power radio. Coverage and communication range for sensor
nodes compared to other mobile devices is limited due to low power capacities of sensor nodes.
Sensor networks are composed of large number of nodes to cover the target area. Nodes in
wireless sensor network communicate with each other to give a common task [1].
How to efficiently utilize the limited amount of energy has been the primary concern in
designing MAC protocols for WSNs [2]. As there was a challenge for WSN designers is to
develop a system that will run for years, they used not only robust hardware and software, but
also lasting energy sources.
In shared channel to manage the access of active node, Medium access control schemes are
used .MAC protocol provides following functional it:

DOI : 10.5121/ijcses.2011.2309 121

 International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Survey (IJCSES) Vol.2, No.3, August 2011

Framing: Define the frame format and perform data encapsulation and de encapsulation
for communication between devices.

Medium access: It controls the devices to participate in communication at any time.

Medium access becomes a main function of wireless MAC protocols since it broadcasts
easily which cause data corruption through collisions.

Reliability: It ensure successful transmission between devices. Mostly through

acknowledgement (ACK) messages and retransmissions when necessary.
Flow control: From beginning to end prevent frame loss, overloaded recipient buffers.

Error control: In frames delivered to upper layers, to have power over the amount of
errors present it uses error detection or error correction codes [3].

2. ATTRIBUTES OF GOOD MAC PROTOCOL

In the wireless sensor networks, for designing high-quality MAC protocol, these attributes are
to be measured [4].
Energy Efficiency: Energy efficiency are the first attribute. Battery powered consist in
The sensor nodes and it is often extremely complicated to change or recharge batteries
for these sensor nodes. Sometimes it is helpful to replace the sensor node rather than
recharging them.
Latency: The second is latency. Latency requirement basically depends on the
application. the detected events must be reported to the sink node in real time In the
sensor network applications, so that the suitable action could be taken immediately.
Throughput: With different applications the throughput requirement also varies. A few
sensor network application require to sample the information with fine temporal
resolution. In such sensor applications it is better that sink node receives more data.
Fairness: In several sensor network applications when bandwidth is limited, it is
compulsory to confirm that the sink node receives information from all sensor nodes
fairly. However along with all of the above aspects the energy efficiency and
throughput are the key aspects. By minimizing the energy wastage energy efficiency
can be increased [4].
3. ENERGY WASTE IN MAC PROTOCL
The reason of wastage of energy in a MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks are the
following [5].

Collision: - Some time the packet gets corrupted during transmission these packet need
to be discarded and resent, these lead to increased energy consumption.

Control Packet Overhead:- Energy is also required for Sending and receiving control
packets due to this less useful data packets can be transmitted.

122
 International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Survey (IJCSES) Vol.2, No.3, August 2011

Idle Listening: - Extra energy is also consumed for Listening to receive possible traffic
which is not sent.

Overhearing:- Sometime nodes can pickup which are destined to other nodes. These
also leads to unnecessary consume of energy.
Reducing the energy wasted idle listing protocols like SMAC, TMAC and CMAC can be used.
SMAC Traditional wakeup scheduling approach which uses fixed duty cycle [4].

Duty Cycle =Listen Interval/ Frame Length

SMAC and TMAC reduce energy consumption by using Coordinated scheduling, but this
requires periodic synchronization. CMAC supports low latency and avoids synchronization
overhead [6]. CMAC allows operation at very low duty cycles by using unsynchronized sleep
scheduling .TMAC uses adaptive duty cycle and has the advantage of dynamically ending
active part [1].

4. TAXONOMY OF MAC PROTOCOLS

The medium access control protocols can be broadly divided into two categories.

1) Schedule based.
2) Contention based.

The schedule based protocols is based on strict time synchronization requirements. They
schedule transmit & listen periods, thus avoiding collisions, overhearing and idle listening.
These protocols are based on Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) technique, they have
higher costs for message collisions, overhearing and idle listening [5].The contention based
protocols relax time synchronization requirements and can easily adjust to the topology changes
by joining some new nodes. Others nodes may die few years after deployment.
4.1 SENSOR MAC (S-MAC)
In wireless sensor network, the Sensor S-MAC protocol is a contention based MAC protocol. It
is an improved version of IEEE 802.11 protocol .The sensor node periodically goes to the fixed
sleep cycle for the medium access control protocol. the time frame is divided into to part: one
for a listening session and the other for a sleeping session In SMAC,. the sensor node are
capable to communicate with additional nodes and send some control packets such as SYNC,
RTS (Request to Send), CTS (Clear to Send) and ACK(Acknowledgement) are only for listen
period. By a SYNC packet exchange all nearest nodes can synchronize collectively and using
RTS/CTS switch over the two nodes can communicate with each other. the Fig. 1 discribe the
basic snode scheme where node 1 transmits data to node 2 is shown . even IF there is no
reception/transmission A lot of energy is still wasted in this protocol during listen period as the
sensor will be awake [7].

Figure 1: Basic S-MAC Scheme, Node 1 Transmits Data to Node 2

123
 International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Survey (IJCSES) Vol.2, No.3, August 2011

4.2 BERKELEY MAC (BMAC)

Another contention based MAC protocol is Berkeley Media Access Control (B-MAC) which is
widely used in WSNs [8]. B-MAC is like to Aloha with Preamble Sampling [9], BMAC duty
cycles the radio transceiver i.e. the Sensor node turns ON/OFF again and again without missing
the data packets. The preamble length is provided as a parameter to the upper layer, which
provides optimal trade-off between energy savings and latency or throughput [5]. BMAC is
also similar to CSMA protocol with having a feature of Low Power Consumption [8].
Unsynchronized duty cycling and long preambles are used in BMAC to wake up receivers.
BMAC increase reliability and channel assessment by a filter mechanism. The sensor node can
change any operating variables in the protocol, such as back off values. This provides a
flexibility interface. BMAC employs an adaptive preamble sampling scheme which minimize
idle listening and reduce duty cycle as shown in fig.2. B-MAC duty cycles the radio through.
Periodic channel sampling that are called Low Power Listening (LPL). The clear channel
assessment (CCA) technique is used by BMAC to decide if a packet is arriving when node
wakes up. If no packet arrived timeout puts node back to sleep. CCA and packet bakeoffs are
used by BMAC for channel arbitration, link layer acknowledgments for reliability. There are no
synchronization, RTS, CTS in BMAC [1].

Figure 2. Preamble sampling in BMAC

4.3 TIMEOUT MAC (TMAC) / DYNAMIC SENSOR MAC (DSMAC)

Static sleep-listen periods of S-MAC result in high latency and lower throughput as indicated
earlier. Timeout- MAC (T-MAC) [9] is proposed to enhance the poor results of S-MAC
protocol under variable traffic load. In T-MAC, when no activation event has occurred listen
period ends for a time threshold TA. Along with some solutions the decision for TA is
presented to the early sleeping problem defined in [9]. Dynamic Sensor-MAC (DSMAC) [10] it
sum the dynamic duty cycle feature to S-MAC. The aim is to Decrease the latency for delay-
sensitive applications. Within the SYNC period, all nodes share their one-hop latency values
(time between the reception of a packet into the queue and its transmission). All nodes start
with the same duty cycle. Fig.3 conceptually depicts DSMAC duty cycle doubling. When a
receiver node notices that average one-hop latency value is high, it decides to shorten its sleep
time and announces it within SYNC period. Accordingly, after a sender node receives this sleep
period decrement signal, it checks its queue for packets destined to that receiver node. If there
is one, it decides to double its duty cycle when its battery level is above a specified threshold.

124
 International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Survey (IJCSES) Vol.2, No.3, August 2011

The duty cycle is doubled so that the schedules of the neighbors will not be affected. The
latency observed with DSMAC is better than the one observed with S-MAC. Moreover, it is
also shown to have better average power consumption per packet [3].

Figure 3 DSMAC duty cycle doubling

4.4 WISE MAC (WMAC)

The working of WiseMAC [11] when the sender starts the preamble before the receiver is
expected to wake up rather than selecting a random time. For alerting the receiving node the
preamble precedes each data packet. The nodes which are presents in the network sample is
having the medium with a common period, but their relative schedule offsets are independent.
If a node finds the medium busy after it wakes up and samples the medium, it regularly listen
till it receives a data packet or the medium comes to the idle state. The size of the preamble in
WiseMAC is initially set to be equal to the sampling period. Fig.4 shows preamble
minimization in WiseMAC. In the Process of learning and refreshing their neighbors the nodes
sleep schedule during every data exchange as part of the Acknowledgment message. The node
keeps a table of the sleep schedules of its neighbors and decides own schedule accordingly. The
possibility to decrease the collisions caused by that specific start time of a wake-up preamble, a
random wake-up preamble can be adopted. The wake-up preamble length gets affects by the
clock drifts between the source and the destination [1].

Figure 4 WiseMAC preamble minimization

4.5 TRAFFIC-ADAPTIVE MAC PROTOCOL (TRAMA)

TRAMA [14] is algorithm based on a TDMA it proposed to increase the utilization of classical
TDMA in an energy efficient manner. It is like Node Activation Multiple Access
(NAMA) [15], where a distributed election algorithm is used to select one transmitter
within two-hop neighborhood for each time slot.

125
 International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Survey (IJCSES) Vol.2, No.3, August 2011

Random-access and Scheduled access (transmission) periods are two part of time. For establish
two-hop topology information Random-access period is used . It is assumed that Mac layer can
calculate the transmission duration needed by the information passed by the application layer.
This transmission duration is denoted as SCHEDULE_INTERVAL. Then at time t, the node
calculates the number of slots for which it will have the highest priority among two-hop
neighbors within the Period [tt+ SCHEDULE_INTERVAL]. The node announces the slots
which will use as well as the intended receivers for these slots with a schedule packet. A bitmap
whose length is equal to the number of its neighbors is used to indicates the intended receivers
by the scheduled packets. Bits correspond to one-hop neighbors ordered by their identities.
identities of the potential senders receiver, one hop neighbors are evaluated for re-use
of those slots [3].

4.6 DATA GATHERING MAC (DMAC)

The another schedule based MAC protocol is DataGathering Medium Access Control
(DMAC) [16]. Which has been planned and optimized for tree based data gathering in wireless
sensor network. The low latency and still maintaining the energy efficiency is the main aim of
this MAC protocol. In this the time is divided in small slots and runs carrier sensing multiple
access (CSMA) with acknowledgement within each slot to transmit/receive one packet. The
sensor node sometimes executes the basic sequence of 1 transmit, 1 receive and n sleep
slots. In this approach a single packet from a source node at depth k in the tree reaches the
sink node with a delay of just k time slots. This delay is very small and it is in the order of
tens of milliseconds. A data gathering (converge cast) tree with staggered DMAC slots is
shown in Fig.5. D-MAC includes an overflow mechanism to handle the problem when each
single source node has low traffic rate but the aggregate rate at intermediate node is larger than
the basic duty cycle. In this mechanism after forwarding the packet, the sensor node will remain
awake for one extra time slot.

Figure 5: Data gathering tree in D-MAC scheme

thus, if two children were differing for parents accept slot, the loosing child will get a second
opportunity to send its packet. The D-MAC uses a separate control packet named MTS (More
to Send) to solve the difficulty of the interference between nodes on the dissimilar branches of
the tree. The MTS packet makes all the nodes on the multi-hop path to remain active in case of
nodes failure due to interference. in terms of energy efficiency, latency and throughput in both
multi-hop chain topology and random data gathering tree topology The simulation results
shows that the D-MAC protocol outperforms the Sensor S-MAC protocol [5].

126
 International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Survey (IJCSES) Vol.2, No.3, August 2011

4.7 CONVERGENT MAC (CMAC)

CMAC [6] is a novel MAC layer protocol; it improves energy efficiency and the latency by
utilizing aggressive RTS, Anycast and convergent packet forwarding mechanisms. It uses
aggressive RTS equipped with double channel check for channel assessment as shown in
fig.6. In CMAC there is unsynchronized sleep scheduling (or duty cycling) when there is no
packet to transmit. it avoids synchronization overhead during supporting low latency. when
there is no traffic, it uses zero communication CMAC allows operation at very low duty cycles.
In the situation of traffic, CMAC first uses anycast for packet forwarding to wake up
forwarding nodes or to quickly discover forwarder and then converges from route- suboptimal
anycast with unsynchronized duty cycling to route-optimal unicast with synchronized
scheduling. For flow initialization it use anycast and for flow stabilization it uses convergent
Packet Forwarding.

Figure 6. Aggressive RTS in Convergent MAC

the checking of the channel twice to avoid missing activities, time between the two checks
should be larger than inter-RTS separation and smaller than RTS duration as shown in fig
7.Receiver needs to check if co-ordination that channel is busy after waking up. Time between
the two checks should be larger than inter-RTS separation and should be smaller than RTS
duration [1].

Figure 7. Double channel checking in Convergent MAC

5. RELATED WORK
By [4] Contention-based and TDMA protocols are the main component of the MAC design for
wireless sensor networks. When nodes are in idle mode the energy consumption using this
MAC is very high.

By [17] Mac protocol work for the CSMA and tonebased MANET.

By [18] WSN MAC protocol focus mainly on energy efficiency.

127
 International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Survey (IJCSES) Vol.2, No.3, August 2011

By [19] the recent work on MAC protocol design in sensor networks [1, 6, 7] focused on
energy efficiency and coordination instead of fairness, delay, and bandwidth utilization.

6. COMPARATIVE STUDY OF EXISTING ENERGY EFFICIENT

MAC PROTOCOLS
Table 1 compares the different MAC protocols discussed in the preceding section. Here, we
have shown their comparison by taking parameter scheme used, energy saving, advantages,
disadvantages [1].

Table-1: Comparative study of Energy-efficient MAC protocols.

Name of
Scheme used Energy Saving Advantages Disadvantages
protocol
Power savings Low energy Sleep latency,
Fixed duty
consumption problem with
SMAC cycle, virtual
over standard
cluster, CSMA
CSMA/CAMAC when traffic is low Broadcast
Better power
Overhearing, bad
Low overhead when
LPL, channel performance at
savings, latency, network is idle,
assessment heavy traffic. Long
BMAC and throughput imple to implement
software transmission latency
than S-MAC Consumes less
interface
power

Uses 20% of
Adaptive duty Adaptive active Early sleeping
energy used in
cycle, time problem
TMAC S-MAC.
overhearing,
FRTS
Energy
Minimized Low power for low
Better than Consumption both
preamble traffic, Do not incur
SMAC and Low at sender And
WISE sampling, overhead due to
Power Listening receiver, and at non
MAC schedule synchronization.
target receiver,
increase latency at
each hop.
Higher energy
Utilization of time is divided into
TRAMA TDMA efficiency &
classical TDMA random access period
throughput
Converge cast Energy saving and Aggregate rate is
DMAC Low latency
communication low letency larger

128
 International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Survey (IJCSES) Vol.2, No.3, August 2011

Aggressive high throughput,

consumes less
Ack. Anycast.
energy than
convergent low latency & Not Yet found
existing
CMAC packet consumes less
solutions
forwarding energy

7. CONSLUSION & FUTURE WORK

Designing a MAC protocol which can improve energy-efficiency to extend network lifetime in
wireless sensor networks is a challenging problem. It is mainly due to stringent resource
constraint both in sensor nodes and in wireless media. Several energy-efficient medium access
control protocols both contention-based and Schedule-based for the wireless sensor network
that have been proposed by the researchers are presented in this paper.
Although there are various MAC layer protocols proposed for sensor networks, there is no
protocol accepted as a standard. One of the reasons behind this is the MAC protocol choice
will, in general, be application-dependent, which means that there will not be one standard
MAC for WSNs.

REFERENCES
[1] A Roy and N Sarma, Energy Saving in MAC Layer of Wireless Sensor Networks:a Survey (
2010) Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Tezpur University, INDIA
,alakroy@yahoo.co.in, nitya@tezu.ernet.in National Workshop in Design and Analysis of Algorithm
(NWDAA), Tezpur University, India.
[2] Kurtis Kred, and Prasant Mohapatra, Medium access control in wireless Sensor networks, ( 31
July 2006) Conference on Computer Networks, vol. 51, pp. 961- 994.
[3] Isha Batra, Dr. Trilok C. Aseri Comparison of Efficient MAC Protocols for Wireless
SensorNetworks (6 February 2010) Department of Computer Science & Engineering, PEC University of
Technology, Sector-12, Chandigarh-160012, India 1 ishabatraladwa@gmail.com,2
a_trilok_chand@yahoo.com Proceedings of the Int. Conf. on Information Science and Applications
ICISA 2010 , Chennai, India.
[4] Wei Ye, J.Heidemann and D. Estrin: An Energy- Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor
Networks, (June 2002).IEEE INFOCOM, New York, Vol. 2, pp. 1567-1576.
[5] Tijs van Dam and Koen Langendoen. An adaptive energy-efficient mac protocol for wireless
sensor networks ,(November 2003) In Proceedings of the First ACM SenSys Conference, pages 171
180, Los Angeles, California, USA, ACM.
[6] Sha Liu, Kai-Wei Fan and Prasun Sinha , An Energy Efficient MAC Layer Protocol Using
Convergent Packet Forwarding for Wireless Sensor Networks, (2007) IEEE SECON.
[7] Rajesh Yadav Electronis and Radar Development Establishment Defense R & D Organization,
Bangalore, India Shirshu Varma Indian Institute of Information Technolgy, Allahabad, India N.
Malaviya Institute of Engineering & Technology, Lucknow, India A SURVEY OF MAC PROTOCOLS
FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS.

129
 International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Survey (IJCSES) Vol.2, No.3, August 2011

[8] J. Polastre, J. Hill, and D. Culler. Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor
networks, ( November 2004) In The Second ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor
Systems (SenSys), pages 95107.
[9] T.V. Dam and K. Langendoen, An Adaptive Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless
Sensor Networks, (November 2003) The First ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor
Systems (Sensys03), Los Angeles, CA, USA.
[10] P. Lin, C. Qiao, and X. Wang, Medium access control with a dynamic duty cycle for sensor
networks, ( March 2004) IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, Volume: 3,
Pages: 1534 - 1539, 21-25.
[11] A. El-Hoiydi: Aloha with Preamble Sampling for Sporadic Traffic in Ad-hoc Wireless Sensor
Networks, (April 2002)in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications .
[12] C.C. Enz, A. El-Hoiydi, J.-D. Decotignie, V. Peiris: WiseNET: An Ultralow-Power Wireless
Sensor Network Solution, (August 2004) IEEE Computer, Vol. 37, Issue 8.
[13] A. El-Hoiydi: Spatial TDMA and CSMA with Preamble Sampling for Low Power Ad-hoc
Wireless Sensor Network, (July 2002) Proceedings of ISCC 02, Seventh International Symposium on
Computers and Communications, pp. 685-692.
[14] V. Rajendran, K. Obraczka, J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, Energy- Efficient, Collision-Free
Medium Access Control for Wireless Sensor Networks,( 5-7 November 2003) Proc. ACM SenSys 03,
Pages:181 - 192, Los Angeles, California.
[15] L. Bao and J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, A New Approach To Channel Access Scheduling For Ad
Hoc Networks(2001), Seventh Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking,
pp. 210221.
[16] G. Lu, B. Krishnamachari, C. Raghavendra: An Adaptive Energy Efficient and Low Latency
MAC for Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks (April 2004), Proceedings of 18thth
International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium.
[17] Ying Li1, Minglu Li1, Wei Shu2 Min-You Wu1 FFT-DMAC: A Tone Based MAC Protocol
with Directional Antennas (2007) IEEE GLOBECOM Department of Computer Science and
Engineering Shanghai Jiao Tong University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The
University of New Mexico.
[18] Muneeb Ali, Tashfeen Suleman, and Zartash Afzal Uzmi MMAC: A Mobility-Adaptive,
Collision-Free MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks( 2005) Computer Science Department,
LUMS {muneeb,tashfeens,zartash}@lums.edu.pk 0-7803-8991-3/05 $20.00 IEEE.

[19] E. Egea-Lo pez J. Vales-Alonso A. S. Martnez-Sala J. Garca-Haro

P. Pavo n-Marino M. V. Bueno Delgado A wireless sensor networks MAC protocol for
real-time applications( 29 June 2006) Springer-Verlag London Limited.

130
 International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Survey (IJCSES) Vol.2, No.3, August 2011

AUTHORS
1) Mrs. Bhavna Narain MCA , M.Phil (CS), has been working in the field of
computers since last ten years, Currently working in SoS of computer science
& IT.Pt. Ravishankar Shukla University, Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India.
Specialization in computer networks(adhoc,mesh).

2) Ms. Anuradha Sharma has done MCA. Currently, she is doing M.Phil (CS &
IT) From SoS of computer science & IT.Pt. Ravishankar Shukla University,
Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India.

3) Dr.Sanjay Kumar has done B.E. (Electrical),M.E.(Computer Science and

Engineering) and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering. At present he is
Reader in computer Science Department of Pt. Ravishankar Shukla University,
Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India. Computer Networking and Paralal Computing are
area of his interest.

4) Dr. Vinod Kumar Patle, is done M.Sc. M.C.A and Ph.D. Currently
he working as Sr. Lecturer in Computer Science at School of Studies
in Computer Science & I.T., Pt. Ravishankar Shukla University,
Raipur (C.G.). His current research is focused on Wireless networking and
Sensor Data Mining.

131