An Energy-Efficient Low-Latency Multi-sink MAC Protocol for Alarm-Driven Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a novel MAC protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)s designated Tone-Propagated MAC (TP-MAC). This protocol is specially suited for early warning and tracking applications, where sensor nodes generate sporadic asynchronous traffic (mainly consisting of uplink alert messages and downlink control messages) with stringent latency requirements. This protocol aims to maximize energy-efficiency while minimizing latency in source-to-sink and sink-to-source communication. This difficult objective is achieved integrating scheduled channel polling (i.e. synchronized low power listening) with rapid fast path establishment based on the propagation of short wake-up tones. An analytical model was used to compare TP-MAC with SCP-MAC. The results show that TP-MAC is able to achieve better target latencies even when its duty-cycle is lower during periods of inactivity. The results also show that the advantage of using TP-MAC increases with the hop-distance between source and sink.