An application-specific duty cycle adjustment MAC protocol for energy conserving over wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensors are battery-powered sensing and computing devices. Comparing with wired sensors, wireless sensors have limited battery life that restricts the communication rage and working time of sensor nodes. Duty cycle adjustment affects the energy consumption and data transmission of wireless sensors. The long duty cycle makes the sensors can have more time to transmit data, and low duty cycle makes the sensors can conserve battery energy. In this paper, we propose an application-specific duty cycle adjustment MAC protocol (i) to conserve energy on sensors with low data traffic and (ii) to decrease transmission latency on sensors with heavy data traffic. In the proposed scheme, nodes are not required to follow a single generic duty cycle. Each node can have different listen and sleep schedules with different duty cycles.