A Retransmission-Enhanced Duty-Cycle MAC Protocol Based on the Channel Quality for Wireless Sensor Networks

Duty-cycle MAC protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to reduce the energy consumed by idle listening, but they introduce significant end-to-end delivery latency. Several works have attempted to mitigate this latency, but they still have a problem on handling the packet loss. The quality of the wireless channel in WSNs is quite bad, so packets are frequently lost. In this letter, we present a novel duty-cycle MAC protocol, called REMAC (RetransmissionEnhanced duty-cycle MAC), which exploits both the network layer and the physical layer information. REMAC estimates the quality of the wireless channel and properly reserves the wireless channel to handle the packet loss. It can reduce the end-to-end packet delivery latency caused by the packet loss without sacrificing the energy efficiency. Simulation results show that REMAC outperforms RMAC in terms of the end-to-end packet delivery latency. key words: WSN, duty-cycle MAC, low latency, energy efficiency, wireless channel quality