MMSMAC: A Multi-mode Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks with Latency and Energy-Awareness

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks called MMSMAC (multi-mode sensor MAC protocol), which operates according to the application requirements and traffic load, in three main modes: synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid. In the synchronous mode, MMSMAC organizes the sensor nodes under even and odd clusters. Each sensor node has its own active/sleep and send/receive periods according to its cluster identifier, which ensures better load balancing among nodes. In the asynchronous mode, sensor nodes communicate freely without the utilization of even and odd clusters. We propose a mechanism to wake up the destination node and minimize the overhead. In this mode, we propose another mechanism to circumvent the problem of hidden host. In the hybrid mode, the features of asynchronous and asynchronous modes are combined. Our simulation results and analysis show that each of the MMSMAC modes shows convincing performance gains and outperforms B-MAC and Hybrid CSMA/TDMA protocols.