A Novel Asynchronous, Energy Efficient, Low Transmission Delay MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices. It is often impractical or even impossible to charge/replace the exhausted batteries of the nodes. Thus, energy consumption is the main concern in a wireless sensor network. Moreover, a critical event detected by the sensor network should be delivered to the user as soon as possible. Thus, for sensor networks, both energy efficiency and transmission latency are important parameters. In this paper, we propose a novel asynchronous, duty cycled, energy efficient, and low transmission delay for wireless sensor networks, which addresses all the sources of energy waste to make the medium access more energy efficient, while keeping transmission delay low.The currently available asynchronous contention-based MAC protocols require that proper strategies for sender and receiver nodes are provided to rendezvous. However, the proposed protocol does not rely on any rendezvous between sender and receiver. For evaluating the novel MAC protocol, we have simulated this protocol and two very efficient and established MAC protocols, RTS/CTS IEEE 802.11 and S-MAC. The simulation results indicate that the proposed protocol has very good performance. In addition, as the results show, the novel protocol provides a very suitable balance between energy efficiency and transmission delay.