Hybrid policy to determine awaking sensor nodes

The Medium Access Control layer in Wireless Sensor Networks handles the failures that occur when a node sends a frame to a dormant neighbor. Some protocols work in such a way that when a node shares its working schedule with its neighbors, each sender node schedules its transmission to the moment when the next node is awake. In others, the nodes do not share information and when one needs to send a frame, it first discovers the time when the next node will be awake. Both approaches are limited due to additional transmissions. This work proposes a hybrid policy that combines the existing ones in order to minimize their costs. Simulation results reveal that our solution often reduces the number of transmissions and energy consumption of the existing policies in the evaluated scenarios.