An efficient neighbor-aware protocol for SNET formation

A wireless mobile sensor network is a collection of wireless mobile hosts forming nodes that are communicating without the aid of any centralized administration or standard support services. Nodes are classified as sensor nodes and router. Some nodes act both as sensors and routers. While traditional MAC protocols must balance between throughput, delay, and fairness concerns, WSN MAC protocols place an emphasis on energy efficiency as well. Schedule-based MAC protocols have been proposed for WSN. A common theme through all these protocols is putting radios to a low-power _sleepmode either periodically or whenever possible when a node is neither receiving nor transmitting. In this paper, we propose a novel cluster-based infrastructure creation protocol, namely: the Neighbor-Aware Clusterhead (NAC). We investigate the performance of the NAC protocol under different sleep scheduling protocols and compare it against another cluster-based protocol. In NAC protocol nodes are synchronized with their clusterheads and are allowed to go sleep mode in order to conserve their energy without degrading the performance of the network. The network is divided into clusters managed by a clusterhead. The simulation results show that NAC protocol has a good potential to be a good candidate protocol for SNET.