RCH-MAC Protocol for Multihop QoS in Wireless Sensor Networks

The design of hybrid MAC protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks for delay sensitive data traffic QoS is a challenging work. We present Reservation Control Hybrid MAC (RCH-MAC) protocol, which reduces end-to-end delay, energy efficiency and maximizes the packet delivery ratio by minimizing the contention at the nodes. Here, a node operates the reservation procedure at the contention-based period and reserves a time slot in the adaptive contention-free time. All the neighbor nodes of the sender and receiver receives their own reservation control packets. Once reserved, the sender transmits data and receives ACK packets at the adaptive contention-free time. Since reservation packets occur in nodes along the routing path, the nodes reserve time slots successively in multi-hop. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol has significantly reduced the end-to-end latency and improved other QoS parameters like energy efficiency and packet delivery ratio.