A Novel Framework to Enhance the Performance of Contention-Based Synchronous MAC Protocols

In this paper, we propose a novel framework to improve the end-to-end transmission delay (E2ETD) and packet delivery ratio (PDR) of existing contention-based synchronous MAC protocols designed for wireless sensor networks, without increasing the duty cycle. This is achieved by partitioning the n deployed sensor nodes into k disjoint sets, which are of almost equal size. It then suitably modifies the cycle structure followed by the existing contention-based synchronous MAC protocols by mapping the data transmission process of k existing cycles into one restructured cycle. To evaluate the performance of this approach, we implement RMAC, PRMAC, and CLMAC protocols in the proposed framework using ns2.35 simulator. Results indicate that our scalable framework reduces the E2ETD and increases the PDR significantly at the cost of a very small increase in average energy consumption.