An Adaptive Message Passing MAC for Wireless Sensor Networks

In the real wireless sensor networks, the traffic load is variable for some application requirements and the wireless channel is error-prone and time-varying. However, the size of fragment is fixed during the whole communication in the S-MAC protocol, which is probably the most well-known sensor MAC protocol for energy efficiency. In this paper, we proposed AMP-MAC protocol, an adaptive message passing MAC protocol for wireless sensor network. The proposed AMP-MAC protocol modified the message passing mechanism of S- MAC protocol to make the size of small fragment adjusted according to different of the traffic load by using the information of the control packet and achieves a significant decrease in energy consumption. Besides, AMP-MAC protocol reduces the extra number of control packets and decreases the collision probability during the whole transmission. Simulations are performed to illustrate that AMP-MAC outperforms S-MAC as well as 802.11-like protocols.