An Energy Efficient MAC in Wireless Sensor Networks to Provide Delay Guarantee

This paper presents RTMAC, a realtime MAC protocol for wireless sensor network that can provide delay guarantee. RTMAC is based on TDMA protocol, but it is carefully designed to overcome the high latency of traditional TDMA protocols. It also conserves energy when a node may not be transmitting or receiving packets. We discuss the details of time slot assignment procedure of RTMAC and then present delay analysis of the protocol. We compare the performance of RTMAC with the well known energy efficient MAC protocol S-MAC using simulation. The simulation results show that RTMAC is better than S-MAC in terms of providing delay guarantee to packets.