A Comparison of MAC Protocols for Wireless Local Networks BAsed on Battery Power Consumption

Energy efficiency is an important issue in mobile wireless networks since the battery life of mobile terminals is limited. Conservation of battery power has been addressed using many techniques. This paper addresses energy efficiency in medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless networks. The paper develops a framework to study the energy consumption of a MAC protocol from the transceiver usage perspective. This framework is then applied to compare the performance of a set of protocols that includes IEEE 802.11, EC-MAC, PRMA, MDR-TDMA, and DQRUMAa. The performance metrics considered are transmitter and receiver usage times for packet transmission and reception. The analysis here shows that protocols that aim to reduce the number of contentions perform better from a energy consumption perspective. The receiver usage time, however, tends to be higher for protocols that require the mobile to sense the medium before attempting transmission.