LLM:Low Latency MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks aim at a special kind of ad hoc networks, exposing an energy-constrained distributed computing environment. Proposed protocols have tried to incorporate power management schemas of the likes of reduced duty cycles and active synchronization. However this has led to a significant loss in the latency of data delivery. In this work we have introduced low latency medium access control (LLM), as a mechanism to deliver data with low latency without compromising the energy efficiency of the network. To this end we exploit the data aggregating properties of a sensor network and introduce a pre-notification packet to keep potential forwarding nodes aware of a forthcoming data packet. Our simulations show that LLM does perform as per expectations