An Energy-Efficient Scheduling MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes a novel MAC protocol for sensor networks which is energy efficient and has a good performance as well. Energy is the most important resource in battery-operated sensor networks. Sensor nodes need the wireless network interface to forward data and it has to be always awake to handle possible traffics. This occupies most energy wastes in sensor nodes and pervious works solved this problem by periodic listen and sleep. However, periodic listen and sleep causes the loss of performance. Our protocol also uses periodic sleeping but listen period are used for multi-hop schedule reservations and data transmission is delayed until schedule time. Schedules are reserved as data are pipelined for energy efficiency and performance. In addition, we suggest an energy efficient error recovery mechanism for data transmissions. We evaluate our protocol and compare with previous MAC protocols through ns-2 simulations.