On the analysis of efficient hybrid MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

This paper presents the design, analysis, and performance evaluation of a hybrid Media Access Control protocol, called CT-MAC, for wireless sensor networks. It is a contention-based TDMA protocol that assimilates the strong points of CSMA and TDMA while offsetting their weaknesses. Based on an adaptive contention/doze and communication/dormancy duty cycle, CT-MAC can efficiently decrease the energy consumption on idle listening. Equipped with the extended RTS-CTS handshake, CT-MAC use the distributed MNLS detection technique to pick out effective links for each time-slot as many as possible. Simulations are performed between CT-MAC and B-MAC, which is regarded is the best CSMA-based sensor MAC protocol. The results show that our CT-MAC protocol is in the ascendant both in energy efficiency and in QoS optimization.