An Energy-Efficient Message Passing Approach in MAC Design for Wireless Sensor Networks

As wireless sensor networks are used more widely, the design of medium access control protocol will be largely various. The paper reviews Sensor MAC (S-MAC), which is the basic MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks, and points its advantages and disadvantages. Several improving S-MAC protocols that focus on different problems in S-MAC are introduced. The Fragment Indication Message Passing (FIMP), a new energy-efficient message passing approach, is proposed to solve the turnaround consumption problem in S-MAC. It exploits a set of special binary codes to indicate each fragment. Thus, the receiver can easily check the failed fragments. Moreover two ACK packets are used to reduce the possible of retransmission.