A Low Duty Cycle MAC Protocol for Directional Wireless Sensor Networks Fernaz Narin Nur 1 • Selina Sharmin 1 • Md. Abdur Razzaque 1 • Md. Shariful Islam 2 • Mohammad Mehedi Hassan 3 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Abstract Directional communication in wireless sensor networks minimizes interference and thereby increases reliability and throughput of the network. Hence, directional wireless sensor networks (DWSNs) are fastly attracting the interests of researchers and industry experts around the globe. However, in DWSNs the conventional medium access control protocols face some new challenges including the synchronization among the nodes, directional hidden terminal and deafness problems, etc. For taking the advantages of spatial reusability and increased coverage from directional communications, a low duty cycle directional Medium Access control protocol for mobility based DWSNs, termed as DCD- MAC, is developed in this paper. To reduce energy consumption due to idle listening, duty cycling is extensively used in WSNs. In DCD-MAC, each pair of parent and child sensor nodes performs synchronization with each other before data communication. The nodes in the network schedule their time of data transmissions in such a way that the number of collisions occurred during transmissions from multiple nodes is minimized. The sensor nodes are kept active only when the nodes need to communicate with each other. The DCD- MAC exploits localized information of mobile nodes in a distributed manner and thus it & Fernaz Narin Nur fernaznur@gmail.com Selina Sharmin selinasf13@gmail.com Md. Abdur Razzaque razzaque@du.ac.bd Md. Shariful Islam shariful.islam@iit.du.ac.bd Mohammad Mehedi Hassan mmhassan@ksu.edu.sa 1 Green Networking Research (GNR) Group, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Dhaka, Dhaka 1000, Bangladesh 2 Institute of Information Technology (IIT), University of Dhaka, Dhaka 1000, Bangladesh 3 College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia 123 Wireless Pers Commun DOI 10.1007/s11277-016-3728-4