Reduced-Pipelined Duty Cycle MAC Protocol (RP-MAC) for Wireless Sensor Network

Recently, the pipeline-forwarding has been proposed as a new technique to resolve the end-to-end latency problem of the duty-cycle MAC protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Some protocols based on this technique such as PMAC and PRI-MAC have shown an improvement not only in terms of reducing end-to-end latency but also in terms of reducing power consumption. In these protocols, however, the sensor nodes still waste a significant amount of energy for unnecessary idle listening during contention period of upstream nodes to check the channel activity. This paper proposes a new pipeline-forwarding duty-cycle MAC protocol, named RP-MAC (Reduced Pipelined duty-cycle MAC), which tries to reduce the waste of energy. By taking advantage of ACK mechanism and shortening the handshaking procedure, RP-MAC minimizes the time for checking the channel and therefore reduces the energy consumption due to unnecessary idle listening. When comparing RP-MAC with the existing solution PRI-MAC and RMAC, our QualNet-based simulation results show a significant improvement in term of energy consumption.