The Study of Traffic-Aware ContikiMAC

Abstract

MAC (Medium Access Control) is an important protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSN) to ensure the efficiency of communication. The ContikiMAC is the default radio duty cycling (RDC) mechanism in Contiki, which is an open source real-time operating system for WSN. ContikiMAC is more energy-efficient than other MAC protocols, but it is not well adapted to variable traffic loads because it’s duty-cycling is based on static wake-up frequency. In this paper, we propose a traffic-aware ContikiMAC which can automatically adjusting the duty cycle according to the traffic load of the network. The simulation results indicate that the traffic-aware ContikiMAC has greatly improved the network in the performance of power consumption, latency and packet loss.