A Cluster Based Adaptive Low Power MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, a novel cluster based adaptive MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSN) is proposed, which is based on clustering network topology. In the proposed MAC protocol, sensor nodes can adjust the duty cycle freely according to traffic information collected by cluster head node. Meanwhile, by exploiting cross-layer routing information, sensor nodes can reduce the active period if no data need to send in a cycle, so the protocol can achieve both low energy consumption and low latency at different traffic. Simulation results based on ns-2 show that the proposed MAC protocol achieves significant performance improvements in energy efficiency, latency and delivery ratio.