Multi-Token Based MAC-Cum-Routing Protocol for WSN: A Distributed Approach

Abstract

A wireless sensor network is a collection of battery powered sensor nodes distributed in a geographical area. In many applications, such networks are left unattended for a long period of time. These networks suffer from the problems like high energy consumption, high latency time, and end- to- end low packet delivery ratio. To design a protocol that finds a trade-off between these problems is a challenging task. In order to mitigate energy consumption issue, different existing Media Access Control (MAC) protocols such as S-MAC, RMAC, HEMAC, and Congestion-less Single Token MAC protocols have been proposed which ensure better packet delivery but fail to ensure energy efficiency due to high end-to-end latency. The problem of high end-to-end latency is resolved with the existing routing protocols such as Fault Tolerant Multilevel Routing protocol (FMS)and Enhanced Tree Routing (ETR) protocol. AS2-MAC and Multi Token based MAC protocol are able to improve the end-to-end packet delivery ratio. However, the hierarchical network structure used in these protocols increases time and energy consumption during network reconstruction. This problem was further resolved in Distributed Hierarchical Structure Routing protocol by constructing the network structure in a distributed manner. In all these existing protocols, efficient token management and reliable data delivery ratio was not properly addressed, which in turn consume more energy. So, it is clear that MAC and routing protocols both together can give better results related to data transmission in WSN. In order to achieve the same, in this paper, we propose a reliable data transmission algorithm that satisfies both routing and MAC protocol to improve the end-to-end data delivery. The proposed protocol uses different control message exchange that ensures data packet delivery in each individual levels and it ultimately uses of tokens to ensure reliable data transmission along with reduced traffic congestion during end-to-end data delivery. The algorithm considerably improves the packet delivery ratio along with reduce energy consumption of each sensor node. Simulation studies of the proposed approach have been carried out and its performance has been compared with the Multi Token based MAC protocol, AS-MAC protocol and ETR routing protocol. The experimental results based on simulation confirms that the proposed approach has a higher data packet delivery ratio.