A Dual Channel-Based Energy Efficient and Low Latency MAC Protocol for WSNs

In order to balance the tradeoff between the energy efficiency and latency which exists in the protocol of the single channel medium access control for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a novel dual channel-based medium access control (MAC) protocol abbreviated as DCMAC is proposed in this paper. The wakeup channel of the nodes in DCMAC implement the listening based on probability during every listening/sleeping cycle in terms of the local information to sense the traffic happening. The main channel of the nodes can be activated to transmit the control and the data information only when the wakeup channel sense the traffic happening. By adopting the scheme of the cost function and the priority based on the local information and the quality of the link, DCMAC disperse the competition among the candidate nodes to reduce the control overhead. Simulation results show that our protocol outperforms other protocols such as GeRaF and SMAC in energy efficiency, multi-hop latency.