SEA-MAC: A Simple Energy Aware MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks for Environmental Monitoring Applications

In this paper, the authors propose SEA-MAC, a new energy aware Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring applications. The proposed MAC scheme is specifically designed for wireless sensor networks which have periodic traffic. The contributions of this paper are: First, the duty cycle is shortened by making nodes wake up only when an environmental sample is taken. Second, in SEA-MAC only the Base Station can start and maintain synchronization. Consequently, the synchronization is unique in the whole network. The proposed wireless sensor network MAC protocol was tested using simulations and real measurements on an implementation using mica2 motes.