PRMAC: Pipelined Routing Enhanced MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

We describe a novel pipelined routing enhanced MAC protocol (PRMAC) for wireless sensor networks that employs cross layer optimization to realize efficient channel access over multiple hops. The main goal of the protocol is to schedule multi hop transmissions of data packets in a single cycle to reduce end- to-end delay. When nodes are awake, a multi-hop flow is constructed using the information from the routing layer, and data packet transmission is scheduled in the subsequent sleep period. When compared with existing solutions such as RMAC, our ns-2 based simulation results show an average 62.2% reduction in end to end packet delivery time for unicast traffic on random networks and up to 200% improvement in delivery ratio on multi-hop chains.