MLMAC-HEAP: A Multi-Layer MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks Powered by Ambient Energy Harvesting

Limited availability of energy is the most crucial constraint of wireless sensor networks (WSN). Most power consuming part of WSN node is transreceiver and operation of transreciever to access medium is controlled by the medium access control (MAC) sublayer of the open systems interconnection (OSI) model. In WSN, till now, most of the present MAC protocols have addressed issues related to power saving. Because of energy constraints, performance is often not a focused design parameter in these MAC protocols. However, recent advances in energy harvesting technology have made it possible to obtain energy from the environment to solve energy limitations. So in this paper, a new multi layer based MAC protocol, MLMAC-HEAP is designed for solar energy harvesting criterion considering performance as the mainly focused parameter. Performance is illustrated in terms of throughput. This paper evaluates the performance of MLMAC-HEAP as a function of energy harvesting rate and number of nodes in network and results are compared and shown to outperform well known MAC protocols. Then, the paper analyses the protocol for various traffic models. Based on application-level requirements, optimization is also done for number of layers.