A roadmap to developing energy-efficient MAC protocol in wireless sensor networks: a case of ADP-MAC development and implementation

Over the past two decades, hundreds of protocols have been developed for diversified applications of WSN corresponding to different layers in the communication stack. Among these, Media Access Control (MAC) layer protocols are of great interest due to providing possibility of optimizing performance parameters. Despite availability of a large number of survey articles, there remains a gap for a tutorial that offers guidelines about the development process of MAC protocol. In this paper, we present a detailed tutorial for developing a MAC protocol starting from the stage of research gap identification and ending at the performance evaluation. We described the journey of development and implementation of a novel asynchronous MAC protocol ADP-MAC (Adaptive and Dynamic Polling MAC) as a case study. ADP-MAC was developed by deploying a novel concept of channel polling interval distributions, and was compared against Synchronized Channel Polling- MAC (SCP-MAC) and lightweight Traffic Auto-Adaptation based MAC (T-AAD). Finally, we proposed major milestones of protocol development along with recommendations about publishing the research.