An Appointment Based MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Several asynchronous duty cycle MAC protocols have been proposed for low power in the wireless sensor networks. However, these proposed MACs pay little attention on the performance degradation in many-to-one communications which is the most common traffic pattern in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose AB-MAC, an appointment based MAC protocol to overcome the effect of channel contention of multiple senders. In AB-MAC, a fusion appointment scheme is proposed to enable scheduled batch transmission for multiple senders with low overhead. This scheme improves the transmission efficiency of the current asynchronous MACs in many-to-one traffic pattern. The experimental results show that, comparing to X-MAC which is a leading asynchronous MAC, AB-MAC can achieve better performance in terms of throughput, latency and energy efficiency.