PL-MAC: ProLonging Network Lifetime with a MAC Layer Approach in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy consumption is one of the most important design criteria in wireless sensor networks. Sensor nodes are expected to be battery-equipped. Due to their working environments, recharging or replacing batteries for each node is difficult and uneconomical. So prolonging the service lifetime of sensor nodes is a critical issue. The MAC protocol for WSNs plays a very important role in the control of energy consumption. Many of proposed MAC protocols attempt only to prolong the network lifetime for energy-efficiency. In this paper, we are going to reduce end-to-end latency in addition to extending the network lifetime. To reach this purpose, we propose a new adaptively ProLong MAC protocol named PL-MAC. We introduce a mechanism, which at data period, a node can go to sleep mode earlier than the specified time for it. PL-MAC is an extension of A-MAC protocol. It simulated in NS-2. Simulation results exhibit that the proposed protocol shows less delay than S-MAC and A-MAC while meeting the network lifetime requirements.