Performance modeling and simulation studies of MAC protocols in sensor network performance

The use of wireless sensor networks is essential for implementation of information and control technologies in precision agriculture. We present our design of network stack for such an application where sensor nodes periodically collect data from fixed locations in a field. Our design of the physical (PHY) layer consists of multiple power modes in both the receive and transmit operations for the purpose of achieving energy savings. In addition, MAC layer is designed which uses these multiple power modes to save energy during the wake-up synchronization phase. We also present analytical models and simulation studies to compare the energy consumption of our MAC protocol with that of the popular S-MAC protocol and show that our protocol has better energy efficiency as well as latency in a periodic data collection application.