CCS-MAC: Exploiting the overheard data for compression in wireless sensor networks

Both the overhearing and overhearing avoidance in a densely distributed sensor network may inevitably incur considerable power consumption. In this paper we propose a so-called CCS-MAC (collaborative compression strategy-based MAC) MAC protocol which facilitates to exploit those overheard data that is treated useless in traditional MAC protocols for the purpose of cost and energy savings. Particularly the CCS-MAC enables different sensor nodes to perform data compression cooperatively with regard to those overheard data, so that the redundancy of data prepared for the link layer transmission can be totally eliminated at the earliest. The problem of collaborative compression is analyzed and discussed along with a corresponding linear programming model formulated. Based on it a heuristic node-selection algorithm with a time complexity of (O(N²)) is proposed to the solve the linear programming problem. The node-selection algorithm is implemented in CCS-MAC at each sensor node in a distributed manner. The experiment results verify that the proposed CCS-MAC scheme can achieve a significant energy savings so as to prolong the lifetime of the sensor networks so far.