WSN05-6: An Energy-Efficient Low-Latency MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Considering the low traffic load and limited resources in wireless sensor network (WSN), this paper presents a power, latency and throughput efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol especially suitable for collaborative applications in wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol, referred to as hybrid MAC (HMAC), combines energy efficiency features of the existing contention-based and TDMA-based MAC protocols and adopts a short frame structure compared to S-MAC to expedite packet delivery. It maintains per-node fairness by allowing more than one neighbors of a node to transmit data to the node in one frame, which further improves the network performance. The proposed protocol has been implemented in NS-2 and our simulation results show that HMAC improves energy consumption by factor of 8 compared to S-MAC. Similarly, on the average, per hop latency is reduced by a factor of 5-13, and throughput is improved by 39%.