A novel TDMA and multi-hop MAC protocol in cluster-based wireless sensor networks

In this paper, a novel TDMA and multi-hop medium access control protocol for cluster-based wireless sensor networks is presented. The communication protocol between cluster head and cluster nodes is developed from the Lightweight Medium Access Protocol (LMAC), but it makes up the defect of the poor network scalability of LMAC which cause from the fixed number of sensor nodes by adding a request slot in time frame and a request section in each work slot. The advantage of the protocol is the inherent energy-efficiency due to the lack of collisions. In addition, the multi-hop mechanism has been developed between cluster head nodes and base station to ensure long-distance information transmission.