A lightweight MAC protocol with adaptive transmission power control in WSNs

This paper proposes an enhanced lightweight medium access control protocol. This protocol combines schedule-based MAC mechanism and adaptive transmission power control (ADTPC-LMAC). This paper introduces a slotting communication mechanism, through which, ADTPC-LMAC solves the problems that normally occur in WSN such as idle listening, over hearing and hidden terminal problem, etc. Nodes only transmit data in their own timeslots and sleep in other timeslots that they don't occupy. In addition, ADTPC-LMAC combines this protocol with an adaptive transmission power level without introducing packet delivery ratio. We compare our protocol with traditional carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) mechanism and the result shows our protocol gives a more reliable packet transmission and prolongs the network lifetime.