EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 
Volume 2005 (2005), Issue 4, Pages 523-540
doi:10.1155/WCN.2005.523

Multihop Medium Access Control for WSNs: An Energy Analysis Model

Jussi Haapola,1 Zach Shelby,1 Carlos Pomalaza-Ráez,1 and Petri Mähönen2

 1Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC), University of Oulu, P.O. Box 4500, Oulu 90014, Finland
2Institute of Wireless Networks, RWTH Aachen University, Kackertstraße, Aachen 9, 52072, Germany
Received 30 November 2004; Revised 30 March 2005

Abstract

We present an energy analysis technique applicable to medium access control (MAC) and multihop communications. Furthermore, the technique's application gives insight on using multihop forwarding instead of single-hop communications. Using the technique, we perform an energy analysis of carrier-sense-multiple-access (CSMA-) based MAC protocols with sleeping schemes. Power constraints set by battery operation raise energy efficiency as the prime factor for wireless sensor networks. A detailed energy expenditure analysis of the physical, the link, and the network layers together can provide a basis for developing new energy-efficient wireless sensor networks. The presented technique provides a set of analytical tools for accomplishing this. With those tools, the energy impact of radio, MAC, and topology parameters on the network can be investigated. From the analysis, we extract key parameters of selected MAC protocols and show that some traditional mechanisms, such as binary exponential backoff, have inherent problems.