Energy Efficient Cross-Layer MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Technological Advances in microelectronic and telecommunication fields enable the existence of tiny computing units, very small and more efficient. In the context of these new technologies, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have emerged. The main research objective in WSN domain is the development of algorithms and protocols ensuring minimal energy consumption. Most proposed solutions are based on one-layer stack model approach. Recently, other works tend to exploit together many layers in order to optimize energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a Cross-Layer Medium Access Control (CL-MAC) protocol using two adjacent layers (MAC and Network) to economize energy for WSN. The basic idea behind our protocol is to wake-up only nodes belonging to a routing path from the source to the base station (Sink) by exploiting routing information while other nodes leave maintained as long time as possible in a sleep mode. The protocol is modeled using a time Petri net and validated by TiNA tool. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal in terms of energy consumption and latency.