An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol with Adaptive Scheduling for Wireless Sensor Networks

Medium access control (MAC) protocols play a crucial role in energy-efficiency, latency reduction for sensor networks. Many research efforts have been made to reduce energy consumption and shorten delay in multi-hop WSNs. Although some existing MAC protocols are energy-efficient and are able to mitigate the end-to-end delivery latency, there are great potential for further improvements. In this paper, we propose a new MAC protocol by introducing a new Adaptive Scheduling (AS) period within which the node's active duration is made adaptive to variable traffic load and able to resiliently schedule data packets for transmission in the Sleep period. The algorithm is designated to schedule more data packets for transmission in bursty and high traffic loads, thus enabling rapid dissemination of data and reduction of the end-to-end delivery latency. While in the light traffic loads, nodes enters the Sleep mode, mitigating idle listening and saving energy. Experiment results show that the proposed protocol is a great advancement of some existing protocols on performance, especially with heavy traffic loads.