A MAC-Routing Integrated Protocol for Geographic Forwarding in Wireless Sensor Networks

Influencing by the design principles of traditional layered protocol stack, current MAC protocol designing for wireless sensor networks (WSN) seldom takes load balance into consideration, which greatly restricts WSN lifetime. In this paper, FE-MAC, as a novel forwarding election-based MAC protocol, is presented to prolong WSN lifetime by means of improving energy efficiency and enhancing load balance. By organizing nodes to contend packet relaying right, nodes with more residual energy have more chance to relay packets for sender, consequently, load balance and routing are achieved. Simulation results show that: Compared with S-MAC and T-MAC protocols, FE-MAC can gain significant longer network lifetime for all scales of networks. FE-MAC is more practical especially for configuring large scale WSN.