Combined analysis of contention window size and duty cycle for throughput and energy optimization in wireless sensor networks

The main objective in a wireless sensor network design is to minimize the energy expenditure for sustaining a long lifetime. Moreover, some recent multimedia applications require the network to satisfy specific throughput and delay constraints for large data sizes. In this paper, we analytically derive the expected throughput and the expected energy expenditure for a synchronized contention-based duty cycled MAC protocol. Our analysis explores the combined effect of contention window size, duty cycle and data size on throughput and energy expenditure for a successful transmission. We show that the performance of the network in terms of both metrics fluctuates with increased duty cycle as opposed to the general intuition that an increase in duty cycle increases the throughput and decreases the energy expenditure in the network. The results, validated by simulations, show that in order to provide an efficient MAC operation, the contention window size and the duty cycle should be optimized together for a given data size.