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

A new MAC protocol abbreviated as ELMAC (Energy-efficient and Low-latency MAC) is proposed in this paper. On the basis of SMAC and ASMAC, the carrier-listening technology in physical layer is applied to compulsorily wake up the neighbor nodes within multi-hops in ELMAC, so that the data transmission over multi-hops can be realized during a single listen/sleep cycle, this leads to the low-latency result. Meanwhile through adopting routing information to modify the RTS/CTS control frame format used by SMAC and ASMAC, ELMAC only make the node of the next hop be adaptively waken up. Thus, the energy consumed by the idle nodes is reduced. Simulation results show ELMAC has advantages such as lower energy-consumption, lower latency and larger data throughput compared with SMAC or ASMAC, especially in aspect of latency.