The MAC protocol design for wireless sensor networks has been researched and developed for decades. SMAC protocol is a famous energy-efficient MAC protocol. Based on SMAC protocol, we find that the boundary nodes in the cluster-shaped synchronization structure bring energy consumption seriously, and provide a virtual cluster aggregation (VCA) algorithm. Because the bounder node follows multiple schedules in one cycle, it may deplete earlier and cause segmentation in wireless sensor networks. The algorithm reduces energy consumption of boundary nodes and extends the lifetime of entire sensor network by merging different virtual clusters, but increases the data transmission delay. Because the sensor nodes have the fixed duty cycle, the larger the coverage area of network is, the greater the data transmission delay increases. We propose the dynamic duty cycle (DDC) algorithm to solve this effect. When the network load and data transmission delay increase, the DDC algorithm exponentially changes the duty cycle of the node to reduce latency. The simulation results show that the performance of SMAC with the VCA and DDC algorithm obtains improvement significantly.
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