An energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor network

Abstract

It is widely known that in wireless sensor networks (WSN), energy efficiency is of utmost importance. WSN need to be energy efficient but also need to provide better performance, particularly latency. A common protocol design guideline has been to trade off some performance metrics such as throughput and delay for energy. This paper presents a novel MAC REE-MAC (Residual Energy Efficient MAC)) protocol that not only preserves the energy efficiency of current alternatives but also coordinates the transfer of packets from source to destination in such a way that latency and jitter are improved considerably. Our simulations show how REE-MAC outperforms the well-known S-MAC protocols in several performance metrics. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.