Energy and Delay Efficient Duty-Cycle MAC Protocol for Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks

Low energy consumption has always been the most important main issue in wireless sensor networks. But many applications requiring low latency and high throughput have been emerged recently. Many existing duty-cycle MAC protocols such as S-MAC [1] and T-MAC [2] provide good power efficiency but introduce significant end-to-end delay. In this paper, we proposed an energy and delay efficient duty-cycle MAC protocol which reduces data transmission delay from source node to destination node and node energy consumption in multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks. The main goal is to design a MAC protocol for object tracking application, in which large amounts of data need to be transmitted when an event occurs. An operation cycle of the proposed MAC protocol is consists of four periods as in LO-MAC [10]. But in the proposed MAC protocol all the nodes in the data path repeat the Sleep periods only when an event occurs. And during Data period nodes immediately go into sleep mode with overhearing the PION packet. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed MAC protocol improves the transmission delay and the throughput compared to the RMAC.