Evaluation of a duty-cycled protocol for TDMA-based Wireless Sensor Networks

Contention-free Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have higher energy efficiency and lower packet latency than contention-based ones due to reduced idling and allow efficient utilization of energy supplies of sensors. This paper presents evaluation the performance of Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) duty-cycled MAC for multihop WSNs. We propose a semi-Markov chains by considering power consumption in different operational models to analyze the Quality of Services (QoS) parameters in terms of energy consumption, delay, and throughput. We show how the model can be applied to impose architectural decisions and compute energy duty-cycles.