A low latency MAC scheme for event-driven wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we present a low latency media access control scheme which we call LLMAC (Low Latency MAC) for event-driven wireless sensor networks (WSN). In this kind of WSN, sensors do not regularly send data to the sink. They send a burst data only when there is an event in the monitoring area. It takes time for this burst data to arrive to the sink. Normally, these events are critical and we hope to obtain the information on the event in the shortest delay. Hence, the latency is considered to be a crucial requirement in event-driven WSN contrary to the traditional wireless networks where the fairness is the most important requirement. Our proposal LLMAC makes a trade-off between fairness and latency in order to offer a shorter latency transmission when certain events happen. The performance evaluation shows that our proposal reduces the latency in comparison to existing MAC protocols.