An Energy-Latency-Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Because nodes are usually battery-powered, the energy presents a very scarce resource in wireless sensor networks. For this reason, the design of medium access control had to take energy efficiency as one of its hottest concerns. Accordingly, in order to improve the energy performance of MAC schemes in wireless sensor networks, several ways can be followed. In fact, some researchers try to limit idle listening while others focus on mitigating overhearing (i.e. a node can hear a packet which is destined to another node) or reducing the number of the used control packets. We, in this paper, propose a new hybrid MAC protocol termed ELE-MAC (i.e. Energy Latency Efficient MAC). The ELE-MAC major design goals are energy and latency efficiencies. It adopts less control packets than SMAC in order to preserve energy. We carried out ns2 simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol. Thus, our simulation’s results prove the ELE-MAC energy efficiency. Additionally, our solution performs statistically the same or better latency characteristic compared to adaptive SMAC. Keywords—Control packet, energy efficiency, medium access control, wireless sensor networks.