On Energy-Efficient and Low-Latency Medium Access Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

• Published in: 2008 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference pp. 1905 - 1910
• Main Authors: Zhiwen Wan, Jinsong Zhang, Hao Zhu, Makki, K., Pissinou, N.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.03.2008
• Subjects: Access protocols; Delay; Energy efficiency; Maintenance; Media Access Protocol; Quality of service; Scalability; Sleep; Wireless application protocol; Wireless sensor networks
• ISBN: 1424419972; 9781424419975
• ISSN: 1525-3511; 1558-2612
• DOI: 10.1109/WCNC.2008.339

In wireless sensor networks, one of the big challenges is to achieve a satisfactory network lifetime while meeting quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel MAC layer protocol which provides energy efficiency, latency guarantee, adaptability and scalability for wireless sensor networks carrying on delay-sensitive applications. Different from existing schemes, our protocol applies an opportunistic sleep scheme to adaptively balance the tradeoff between energy efficiency and the end-to-end delay. Each sensor node maintains its own wakeup probability which is adaptively adjusted according to the local network conditions to reduce the energy consumption without the increased transmission latency. In addition, an energy-aware antcast-based data forwarding scheme is introduced to further reduce sleep latency influence on the end-to-end delay and improve the communication reliability. We implement our protocol in the ns-2 simulator and compare with other protocols. Simulation results show that our protocol outperforms other protocols in terms of balancing the tradeoff between energy efficiency and the end-to-end delay.