A Pipelined-forwarding, Routing-integrated and effectively-Identifying MAC for large-scale WSN

This paper presents the design of a duty-cycling MAC, called PRI-MAC (Pipelined-forwarding, Routing-integrated, and effectively-Identifying MAC), for large-scale wireless sensor networks. PRI-MAC divides the whole network into grades around the sink node. The higher grade a node is in, logically the further away it is from the sink which is in the lowest grade. Staggered sleep-wakeup schedules are established between any two adjacent grades such that data can be forwarded in a pipelined fashion, largely reducing the packet delivery latency to meet the real-time transmission requirement. Meanwhile, the routing function is seamlessly integrated into PRI-MAC, which reduces the protocol overhead and increases the network scalability. Furthermore, each node utilizes a randomly-generated integer as its identifier only when it is involved in a data transmission, instead of allocating a unique address for each sensor node. The performance of PRI-MAC is evaluated in comparison with PW-MAC by OPNET, in terms of the packet delivery latency, energy efficiency, and throughput.