Ittipong Khemapech, University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, Thailand

Energy conservation is one of the important issues in communication protocol development for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). WSNs are a shared medium system, consequently a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is required to resolve contention. The feature of the MAC together with the application behavior determines the communication states which have different power requirements. The power level used for a transmission, will affect both the effective range of the transmission and the energy used. The Power & Reliability Aware Protocol (PoRAP) has been developed to provide efficient communication by means of energy conservation without sacrificing reliability. It is compared to Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA), Sensor-MAC (S-MAC) and Berkeley-MAC (B-MAC) in terms of energy consumption. The analysis begins with a parameter space study to discover which attributes affect the energy conservation performance. Parameter settings in the Great Duck Island are used for comparative study. According to the results, PoRAP consumes the least amount of communication energy and it is applicable when the percentage of slot usage is high.

Energy Aware, Sensor, Communication Protocols, Comparative Analysis