R-MAC: Reservation Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy consumption is a critical issue in wireless sensor networks as the battery of a sensor node, in most cases, cannot be recharged or replaced after deployment. In order to detect an event, a sensor node spends most of the time in monitoring its environment, during which a significant amount of energy can be saved by placing the radio in the low power sleep mode when no reception and/or transmission of data is involved. In this paper, we discuss the design of a new MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks, which mainly avoids overhearing, collisions, and frequent commutation between sleep and active modes. These issues are generally considered to be the most important reasons behind energy waste in heavy loaded conditions of wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol, called Reservation-MAC (R-MAC), uses two separate periods during the communication process. In the first period, nodes compete for time slots reservation for their future transmissions, and in the second period, each node transmits its data or receive data from a corresponding sender. Once a node is aware of its transmission and/or reception time slot, it stays active only for these time slots and goes back to the sleep mode during the remaining time of the transmission period. In our experiments, the performance of the R-MAC protocol is studied in saturated conditions and compared with the well known S-MAC and T- MAC protocols. Depending on the traffic load, the proposed MAC protocol significantly improves the energy consumption compared to S-MAC and T-MAC.