Towards energy-efficient MAC protocols

Abstract

During the past two decades the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) has become an integral part of our lives with exponentially increasing user interest and the vast number of applications being developed and used. The downside of the increase in these numbers is the continuous increase in the energy consumption. Various resources indicate that nowadays ICT is responsible for around 2%to 5%of the total global energy consumption and as new technologies are being developed these numbers are very likely to increase in a proportional manner. In the past networking protocols were developed for maximum efficiency however without any energy constraints. Because of the analyses and expectations specified above it has now become very important to develop new energy efficient networking protocols which will replace their corresponding ones. For all layers of the Internet protocol stack studies have shown that significant energy savings can be achievable. This paper classifies the MAC protocols and describes some of the recent energy efficiency studies in the MAC sublayer. The reduction of energy consumption will not only have economical benefits but also environmental benefits that will have a positive impact for our lives in the future.