Energy-efficient MAC protocol based on IEEE 802.11e for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSN) was always a basic constraint to respect. But, with the appearance of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSN), another basic constraint comes from added, which is the traffic performance in terms of delay, throughput, and Packet Delivery Rate (PDR). The choice of channel access method can help us to better respond the two constraints in WMSN. The Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) access method has been frequently used by WSN with different modifications to reduce energy consumption. But in the WMSN, we must take into consideration as well the traffic performance. Hence the idea to study the feasibility of using an access method of the IEEE 802.11e in WMSN. In this paper we will analyze energy consumption and evaluate the performance of the 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) with and without the mechanism Contention Free Burst (CFB), compared with IEEE 802.11 DCF. The results show that the use of EDCA CFB gives better performance, and offers a very good relationship between energy consumption and traffic performance, which is recommended in WMSN.