Latency and Energy Efficient MAC (LEEMAC) Protocol for Event Critical Applications in WSNs

Wireless sensor networks are appealing to researchers due to their wide range of application potential in areas such as target detection and tracking, environmental monitoring, industrial process monitoring, and tactical systems. However, lower sensing ranges result in dense networks, which bring the necessity to achieve an efficient medium access protocol subject to power constraints. Various MAC protocols with different objectives were proposed for wireless sensor networks. The paper focused mainly on latency issue for event critical applications. In this paper, we propose LEEMAC, a Latency and Energy Efficient MAC Protocol which is an improvement of DMAC protocol in a sense that it gives us better latency and a slight improvement in energy efficiency than by DMAC which was designed and optimized for data gathering trees where data is collected from all the source nodes to the sink node. The paper first outlines the sensor network properties that are crucial for the design of MAC layer protocols. Then, we discussed briefly DMAC protocol with respect to the enhancements brought in LEEMAC. Then data modeling results are shown to compare the latency and energy for DMAC and LEEMAC protocols. Finally, we point out open research issues on MAC layer design.