GWMAC- A TDMA Based MAC Protocol for a Glacial Sensor Network

• Main Authors: Elsaify, Ahmed, Padhy, Paritosh, Martinez, Kirk, Zou, Gang
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2007
• Subjects: Norway; glacier
• Online Access: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/264415/; https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/264415/1/GWMAC.pdf

Wireless sensor networks demand the need to design practical and robust communication protocols to meet the application specifications. Our research focuses on designing and implementing an environmental sensor network to be used for sub-glacial study. The glacier is a very hostile environment presenting severe challenges and complications in the smooth functioning of such a network. In light of these challenges, we present a low power sensor node design and an energy-efficient medium access control protocol called GWMAC developed for a network deployed in a glacier in Norway. The general architecture of GWMAC is based on scheduling and time division multiple accesses (TDMA). We argue that for a highly dynamic network such as ours, GWMAC is more desirable over more widespread protocols such as S-MAC and LMAC. In doing so, we perform extensive series of simulations to empirically evaluate our claim. Our results illustrate that on average GWMAC can increase the network life time by at least 63%. This also has a significant effect on the amount of data that can be collected over network life time.