HEEMAC+: An Enhanced Harvested Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for WSNs

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are well aware of the need of energy efficiency. While enhancing WSN performance overall, especially latency, an increase in energy economy is also required. Giving up some performance indicators, including throughput, in favor of energy efficiency is a popular approach for protocol design. Thus, an asynchronous MAC protocol called an enhanced Harvested Energy-Efficient MAC (HEEMAC+) is proposed in this paper to conserve energy inside a WSN with energy harvesters. Through the use of receiver-initiated schemes, HEEMAC+ uses beacon messages to reduce duty-cycle by utilizing the energy threshold in addition to the remaining energy that each sensor node in the WSN determines how long it will sleep for next. Moreover, HEEMAC+ uses the switching method to ensure load balancing in WSN. This allows the nodes to maximize their energy efficiency. According to simulation results performed using OMNeT++/MiXiM, HEEMAC+ outperforms both EEMEHWSN, DSR, and DSP schemes.