ERI-MAC: An Energy-Harvested Receiver-Initiated MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy harvesting technology potentially solves the problem of energy efficiency, which is the biggest challenge in wireless sensor networks. The sensor node, which has a capability of harvesting energy from the surrounding environment, is able to achieve infinitive lifetime. The technology promisingly changes the fundamental principle of communication protocols in wireless sensor networks. Instead of saving energy as much as possible, the protocols should guarantee that the harvested energy is equal to or bigger than the consumed energy. At the same time, the protocols are designed to have the efficient operation and maximum network performance. In this paper, we propose ERI-MAC, a new receiver-initiated MAC protocol for energy harvesting sensor networks. ERI-MAC leverages the benefit of receiver-initiated and packet concatenation to achieve good performance both in latency and in energy efficiency. Moreover, ERI-MAC employs a queueing mechanism to adjust the operation of a sensor node following the energy harvesting rate from the surrounding environment. We have extensively evaluated ERI-MAC in a large scale network with a realistic traffic model using the network simulator ns-2. The simulation results show that ERI-MAC achieves good network performance, as well as enabling infinitive lifetime of sensor networks.