SW-MAC: A Low-Latency MAC Protocol with Adaptive Sleeping for Wireless Sensor Networks

• Published in: Wireless personal communications Vol. 77; no. 2; pp. 1191 - 1211
• Main Authors: Liang, Lulu, Liu, Xiaonan, Wang, Yongtao, Feng, Weiduan, Yang, Guang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01.07.2014; Springer
• Subjects: Access methods and protocols, osi model; Applied sciences; Communications Engineering; Computer Communication Networks; Computer science; control theory; systems; Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface; Delivery scheduling; Engineering; Exact sciences and technology; Networks; Radiocommunications; Remote sensors; Scheduling; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Sleep; Software; Synchronism; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Teleprocessing networks. Isdn; Traffic engineering; Traffic flow; Wireless networks; MAC protocol; Wireless sensor networks; Event detection; Scout packets; Access control; Energy consumption; Transmission protocol; Scheduling; Synchronization; Adaptive method; Wake; Delay; Variance; Arrival time; Sleep; Traffic management; Beacon; Wireless network; Access protocol; Resource management; Sensor array
• ISSN: 0929-6212; 1572-834X
• DOI: 10.1007/s11277-013-1561-6

A low duty-cycle operation medium access control (MAC) protocol is very important to conserve energy for resource-constrained wireless sensor networks. Traditional sleep-wake scheduling mechanisms of MAC protocols either require periodic synchronization beacons or bring high end-to-end delivery latency due to the lack of any synchronization. In this paper, we propose a low latency MAC protocol by adjusting the sleep window (SW-MAC) considering traffic patterns. Nodes in SW-MAC transmit a sequence of scout packets to wake up the next hop and estimate the traffic arrival time from upstream nodes to sleep adaptively. For the large variance traffic, we adjust the sleep window using additive increase/multiplicative decrease mechanism. And then we design a scout-based scheduling mechanism with the above algorithms to shorten the delivery latency. Simulation results indicate that SW-MAC could significantly reduce the end-to-end packet delivery latency without sacrificing energy efficiency.