An Energy-Aware Algorithm for TDMA MAC Protocols in Real-Time Wireless Networks

In distributed embedded systems operated by battery, energy management is a critical issue that has to be addressed at different architecture levels. For systems that tightly interact with the environment, an additional goal is to enforce a set of real-time constraints to guarantee a desired performance. A lot of research has focused on power management at the communication level, especially for MAC protocols. However, not many authors considered both real-time and energy requirements in wireless communication systems. In this paper we present El-MAC, an elastic energy-aware algorithm at the MAC level for wireless distributed systems with real-time constraints. Under this framework, each node can adapt its bandwidth requirements to balance performance versus energy consumption, taking both lifetime and message deadlines into account. We describe the algorithm for a generic TDMA MAC protocol.