Energy efficient scheme for wireless sensor networks based on contikimac protocol

The Internet of Things (IoT) based remote sensing applications have seen a growing trend in recent years in order to gather intelligent insights and perform real-time like decisions. The IoT applications mostly rely on the underlying Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for information collection and communication. The radio operation of these WSN nodes are the most power hogging components, therefore, estimating and optimizing the power consumption on these nodes helps to improve the device lifetime. Modern low-power radios are efficient but still require optimization per application basis, therefore, MAC and cross-layer protocols help to achieve this by optimizing the device's radio duty cycles. ContikiMAC is a low-power protocol designed for WSNs that can be tuned to adjust its radio duty cycle by optimizing clear channel assessment (CCA) and channel check rates (CCR) per application basis. This article first analyses the performance of ContikiMAC in a bursts and non-uniform data environment and reports the limitations. Secondly, it investigates the ContikiMAC operation for infrequent data environments. Finally, an extension to ContikiMAC is developed for improved CCA which reduces idle-listening and false-wakeUps for improved energy consumption per node. The simulation results from Cooja Simulator thoroughly investigates these schemes and reports energy consumption improvements in contrast to ContikiMAC are reported.