Improved medium access control for wireless sensor networks - a study on the S-MAC protocol

An efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol is critical for the performance of a wireless sensor network (WSN), especially in terms of energy consumption. In this work we discuss the efficiency of S-MAC, a well-known MAC protocol for WSNs, and propose an improvement on the protocol. Via an extensive simulation study considering the cases of both simple and complicated topologies, the enhanced protocol is shown to outperform the original version of S-MAC in energy conservation