Medium reservation based sensor MAC protocol for low latency and high energy efficiency

In this paper, we present a new MAC protocol satisfying with both high energy efficiency and low transmission latency at the same time over wireless sensor network, named as medium reservation preamble based MAC (MRPM). Unlike other synchronized duty cycle MACs, MRPM does not have separate time frames for SYNC and data traffics. Both traffics are integrated in a short listen period. Also, the channel contention is excluded from listen period and transferred to new period called contention period. The contention period precedes the listen period, and only transmitters wake up in this contention period and contend for medium reservation, whereas non-transmitters bypass it. These approaches enable MRPM to achieve adaptive duty cycle and quite short listen period. Moreover, MRPM uses carrier sensing information for advanced adaptive listening which makes packets to travel multiple hops away in a single sleep/listen cycle. The simulation results verify that MRPM has features of high energy efficiency and low latency.