DESIGN OF CAUCUS MEDIUM ACCESS CONTROL (C-MAC) PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS IN SMART GRIDS

Abstract

A Caucus-based medium access control protocol (C-MAC) is proposed to reduce the end to end delay and battery consumption of the sensor nodes deployed in the monitoring of various smart grid regions, such as substation, pole and wires, perimeter security, real time and non-real-time monitoring using wireless sensor networks. The objective is to prolong the network lifetime and to reduce the end to end delay by mitigating the energy-hole problem and by eliminating bottlenecks significantly by using caucus based efficient synchronization techniques in multi-hop square grid topology of the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The protocol self-reliantly and adaptively schedules node’s wake-up times, decreases idle listening and collisions, increases network throughput, and extends network lifetime. It induces a low duty cycle for adjusting wake-up times of sensor nodes. The appropriate selection of active and sleep time slots and next hop relay nodes are proposed to minimize the data transmission latency and to reduce battery consumption to increase the network lifetime. The uniform and synchronized transmission of the data packets is of prime importance to improve the network performance. Simulation results justify that the proposed C-MAC protocol increases the network lifetime, successful data transmission ratio along-with the reduction in end to end delay. The objective of this paper is to envisage benefits and utilization of C-MAC protocol for WSNs deployed in smart grids and to draw the attention of researchers in this area.

Keywords

• Caucus based medium access control
• Network lifetime
• Relay nodes
• Transmission latency
• Harsh environments
• Smart grid