A lifetime-balancing MAC protocol under the end-to-end delay requirement

This article presents lifetime-balancing medium access control (LB-MAC), a new medium access control (MAC) protocol with embedded adaptivity for asynchronous, duty cycle sensor networks. Different from existing sensor network MAC protocols that usually focus on reducing energy consumption and extending lifetime of individual sensor nodes, LB-MAC aims at prolonging the network lifetime under a certain end-to-end delay requirement. It achieves this goal by dynamically tuning a comprehensive set ofMAC parameters. LB-MAC is a distributed, lightweight, and scalable solution, as the required control information is only exchanged locally between neighbors. LB-MAC has been implemented in TinyOS and evaluated on a sensor network testbed with extensive experiments. Results show that LB-MAC is able to yield a significantly longer network lifetime than state-of-the-art MAC protocols such as X-MAC, RI-MAC, and SEESAW, while meeting the end-to-end delay requirement, andmaintaining comparable levels of data delivery ratio and average nodal power consumption.