TASL: A Traffic-Adapted Sleep/Listening MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network

In this paper, we proposed TASL-MAC, a medium-access control (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks. In wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes are usually deployed in a special environment, are assigned with long-term work, and are supported by a limited battery. As such, reducing the energy consumption becomes the primary concern with regard to wireless sensor networks. At the same time, reducing the latency in multi-hop data transmission is also very important. In the existing research, sensor nodes are expected to be switched to the sleep mode in order to reduce energy consumption. However, the existing proposals tended to assign the sensors with a fixed Sleep/Listening schedule, which causes unnecessary idle listening problems and conspicuous transmission latency due to the diversity of the traffic-load in the network. TASL-MAC is designed to dynamically adjust the duty listening time based on traffic load. This protocol enables the node with a proper data transfer rate to satisfy the application`s requirements. Meanwhile, it can lead to much greater power efficiency by prolonging the nodes` sleeping time when the traffic. We evaluate our implementation of TASL-MAC in NS-2. The evaluation result indicates that our proposal could explicitly reduce packet delivery latency, and that it could also significantly prolong the lifetime of the entire network when traffic is low.