A New MAC Protocol for Improving Energy Efficiency and Reducing End-to-end Packet Delay in Wireless Sensor Networks

Latency and energy efficiencies are the prime requirement of wireless sensor network (WSN). In this paper, we propose a new event driven medium access control (MAC) protocol, which is called modified routing-enhanced duty-cycle MAC (MRMAC). Our proposed MRMAC protocol improves data transmission delay while reducing the energy consumption in multi-hop WSNs. In MRMAC, the conventional 10% duty cycle of sensor nodes are divided into two equal parts, i.e., 5% and 5%. In each time cycle, all the nodes in the routing path from source to destination repeatedly go to sleep and active modes twice. At the starting of a time cycle, the source node transmits the pioneer control frame (PION) packet to ensure the synchronization of all the intermediate nodes throughout the data transmission path. Simulation results confirm that the proposed MRMAC protocol provides 42% lower delay and 30% lower energy consumption compared to the reported two existing MAC protocols.