JWCN_V4_N2_RP1 K. Nirmal Raja M. Marsaline Beno Journal On Wireless Communication Networks 2320 - 2351 4 2 13 20 Energy Efficiency, Medium Access Control (MAC), Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are battery-operated computing and sensing devices. The sensor nodes' lifetime is mainly influenced by its battery lifetime. Hence in a WSN MAC, energy conservation and self-configuration are primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important. WSN devices include a low-rate, short-range wireless radio (10–100 kbps, <100 m). Radio communication is often the most power intensive operation and also the major contributor to the overall nodes' energy consumption, and hence the radio must incorporate energy-efficient sleep and wake-up modes. In this paper, three low power RF protocols such as SimpliciTI, TI-MAC, ZStack radio developed by Texas Instruments (TI) were implemented on CC2530 to form a simple data gathering star network. A contention-based MAC mechanism (CSMA/CA) is followed. The wireless protocols are tested for its operation and the performance measures such as the energy consumption of each node and the average energy of the received packets are measured for each protocol and compared. July - September 2015 Copyright © 2015 i-manager publications. All rights reserved. i-manager Publications http://www.imanagerpublications.com/Article.aspx?ArticleId=3585