An Energy-Efficient and Low-Latency MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, an energy-efficient and low-latency MAC (L-MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks is proposed. In the protocol, active period is divided into two parts, i. e. receiving period and sending period, and they are staggered hop by hop. That is, after receiving messages from upper-hop node, each node can transmit them to next-hop node immediately in the subsequent sending period. Therefore, the multi-hop end-to-end latency is greatly reduced. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves lower energy consumption and latency than traditional contention-based protocols.