Scalable and energy efficient medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Scalable and efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol has been of the paramount significance for boosting the performance of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, scalable and efficient medium access control (SE-MAC) protocol is introduced for WSNs. The Goal of SE-MAC is to reduce the communication delay time, channel delay time and control delays caused by acknowledgment packets, request-to-send (RTS), clear-to-send (CTS) etc. Thus, reducing the delays, SE-MAC incorporates the adaptable application independent aggregation (AAIA) model to achieve the expected goals. Furthermore, SE-MAC is supported with handoff process feature, which helps extend the network lifetime. AAIA model for SE-MAC plays a role of cross-layering that extensively reduces the different delays incurred at MAC sub-layer and network layer. Evaluation of SE-MAC is conducted using network simulator-2 (NS2) then compared with known MAC protocols: Zebra medium access control (Z-MAC), receiver-initiated asynchronous duty cycle MAC (RI-MAC) and an energy-efficient multi-channel mac (Y-MAC). Based on the initial Simulation results, we demonstrate that SE-MAC protocol saves extra 9.8-15% time and energy resources for channel delays as compared with other MAC protocols.