A Multi-Hop Low Duty Cycle MAC protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The proposed model, Multi-Hop Low Duty Cycle Medium Access Control (MLDC-MAC) protocol, assumes that the deployment area is composed of equal-sized grids. The sensor nodes that fall within a grid are considered to be the part of the same cluster. The base station appoints the node with the highest residual energy as the cluster head in each grid. The base station also establishes multi-hop paths for communicating with the cluster heads and broadcasts the schedule for inter-cluster communication in the network. After receiving this information, each cluster head broadcasts a schedule for intra-cluster communication within its cluster. When a cluster head receives data from the source nodes in its cluster, it computes the aggregate and sends it to the base station. The simulation results show that MLDC-MAC increases the network lifetime compared with Low Duty Cycle MAC (LDC-MAC) protocol and Bit-Map-Assisted MAC (BMA-MAC) protocol.