A Cooperative Low Power Mac Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Over the last decade cooperative communication in wireless sensor networks (WSN) received much attention. A lot of works have been done to propose a MAC layer that supports cooperative communication. However the impact of the association of a cooperative communication technique with a low power listening scheme was not studied in the literature. In this paper we propose CL-MAC, a Cooperative Low power mac protocol for WSNs. CL-MAC implements jointly Low Power Listening and cooperative communication. More precisely, we propose two variants of this protocol: a proactive version CL-MAC(P) and a reactive version CL-MAC(R). In order to evaluate the performances of the two proposed CL-MAC variants, we compare its to those of X-MAC. Simulation results proved that our protocol is able to enhance the use of the channel and to reach promising energy preservation especially in dense networks.