A Wakeup Adapting Traffic and Receiver-Initiated Duty Cycle Protocol for WSN

In order to improve the energy efficiency, delivery ratio and latency, this paper presents WAT (Wakeup Adapting Traffic), a novel receiver-initiated duty cycle protocol for wireless sensor networks. WAT reduces sensor nodes´ duty cycle by enabling a receiver to choose a wakeup interval adapted to traffic, and then produce the next wakeup time randomly. WAT introduces an efficient duty cycle schedule and retransmission mechanism to achieve low collisions and high efficiency retransmission. We evaluate WAT in simulation and compare it to the prior duty cycle protocols of RI-MAC and X-MAC. Under the scenarios with a 7×7 grid network and the scenarios with a random network with 50-nodes, WAT significantly outperforms X-MAC. WAT achieves lower average duty cycle under a wide range of traffic. At the same time, WAT maintaining a high packet delivery ratio and a low packet delivery latency. Compared to RI-MAC, WAT achieves the same high performance under light traffic loads. Moreover, WAT improves energy efficiency and packet delivery latency over RI-MAC under bursty and high traffic load.