Neighbor-Aware Clusterhead with Different Sleep Scheduling Protocols

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of wireless mobile hosts forming nodes that are arbitrarily and randomly changing their locations and communicating without the aid of any centralized administration or standard support services. Nodes are classified as sensor nodes and routers. Some nodes act both as sensors and routers. While traditional MAC protocols must balance between throughput, delay, and fairness concerns, WSN MAC protocols place an emphasis on energy efficiency as well. Schedule-based MAC protocols have been proposed for WSN. A common theme through all these protocols is putting radios to a low-power "sleep mode" either periodically or whenever possible when a node is neither receiving nor transmitting. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the Neighbor-Aware Clusterhead (NAC) under different sleep scheduling protocols. We study the characteristics and performance of the NAC protocol by means of simulation. In NAC protocol, nodes are synchronized with their clusterheads and are allowed to go into asleep mode. The simulation provides a promising results that makes NAC protocol to be considered as a good candidate protocol for sensor network (SNET).