Latency of Energy Efficient MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks have recently emerged as an important computing platform. These networks necessitate suitable protocol solutions. Researchers, over the recent past have fine tuned MAC protocols for sensor networks and provided techniques to reduce energy consumption, maximize throughput and accurate latency. Some of these goals may be conflicting and may enforce a trade-off. Balanced emphasis of the design goals would have to be based on application requirements. For example, many sensor network applications are: latency sensitive. In this paper, we first overview the key proposed energy efficient MAC protocols for sensor networks. We define and study latency in wireless sensor networks with different topologies and number of nodes for IEEE 802.11, SMAC, Adaptive SMAC and TDMA.