RMAC: A Routing-Enhanced Duty-Cycle MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Duty-cycle MAC protocols have been proposed to meet the demanding energy requirements of wireless sensor networks. Although existing duty-cycle MAC protocols such as S-MAC are power efficient, they introduce significant end-to-end delivery latency and provide poor traffic contention handling. In this paper, we present a new duty-cycle MAC protocol, called RMAC (the Routing enhanced MAC protocol), that exploits crosslayer routing information in order to avoid these problems without sacrificing energy efficiency. In RMAC, a setup control frame can travel across multiple hops and schedule the upcoming data packet delivery along that route. Each intermediate relaying node for the data packet along these hops sleeps and intelligently wakes up at a scheduled time, so that its upstream node can send the data packet to it and it can immediately forward the data packet to its downstream node. When wireless medium contention occurs, RMAC moves contention traffic away from the busy area by delivering data packets over multiple hops in a single cycle, helping to reduce the contention in the area quickly. Our simulation results in ns-2 show that RMAC achieves significant improvement in end-to-end delivery latency over S-MAC and can handle traffic contention much more efficiently than S-MAC, without sacrificing energy efficiency or network throughput.

MAC2: A Multi-Hop Adaptive MAC Protocol with Packet Concatenation for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…In contrast to each of the above protocols multi-hop MAC protocols [7], [8], [21] support multi-hop transmission (more than two hops) in a single operational cycle. Like single-hop protocols they usually divide the cycle into the sync, data and sleep periods as introduced by Sensor MAC [8].…”

“…RMAC [7] adds cross-layer information to the traditional RTS packet to create a new efficient control packet named pioneer (PION). A PION can traverse multiple hops, play both RTS and CTS roles, and it has a scheduling function.…”

“…Therefore, many improvements to the initial mechanism have been proposed. Among them the idea of forwarding a packet through several hops within one duty cycle, as initially shown in RMAC [7] (Routing enhanced MAC), has proven to be particularly efficient in achieving those goals. The proposed protocols use a single control packet instead of the common RTS/CTS (Requestto-Send/Clear-to-Send) pair to setup a flow across multiple hops.…”

IRI-MAC: An Improved Receiver Initiated MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network

“…In different MAC protocols [6][7][8]10,11] imply different mechanism to transmit data at different time. Their transmission is offsetting by different influential factor that could cause avoid collision and data is transmitted to target receiver easily.…”

A Real-Time MAC Protocol with Extended Backoff Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…For the sake of the energy constrained application, the design model to decrease energy consumption is often selected in MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol [2]. Therefore, substantial number of the MAC protocols [3][4][5][6][7] for wireless sensor networks are designed in the literature for the traditional challenge: energy-efficiency. However, in several special cases, a fundamental requirement is timely message transmission.…”