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

Energy efficiency is one of the most concerned issues in wireless sensor networks, and periodic listen/sleep mechanism is widely used to reduce energy consumption. But fixed listen/sleep scheme also introduces additional latency in packet delivery and waste of energy for unnecessary idle listening. In this paper, we propose a low latency and energy efficient MAC protocol with an adaptive listen/sleep mechanism, named ALLEE-MAC. Two novel schemes are introduced, one is continual data transmission scheme and the other is early-sleep scheme. For achieving these schemes, a cross-layer design approach is adopted in ALLEE-MAC. Simulations have been done to evaluate the performance of the proposed new protocol, by which we can find out that ALLEE-MAC can really reduce packet end-to-end delay and energy consumption compared with S-MAC/AL.