REA-MAC:A low latency routing-enhanced asynchronous duty-cycle MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Many energy efficiency asynchronous duty-cycle MAC(media access control) protocols have been proposed in recent years.However,in these protocols,wireless sensor nodes almost choose their wakeup time randomly during the operational cycle,which results in the packet delivery latency increased significantly on the multiple hops path.To reduce the packet delivery latency on multi-hop path and energy waste of the sender’s idle listening,a new low latency routing-enhanced asynchronous duty-cycle MAC protocol was presented,called REA-MAC.In REA-MAC,each sensor node decided when it waked up to send the beacon based on cross-layer routing information.Furthermore,the sender adaptively waked up based on the relationship between the transmission request time and the wakeup time of its next hop node.The simulation results show that REA-MAC reduces delivery latency by 60% compared to RI-MAC and reduces 8.77% power consumption on average.Under heavy traffic,REA-MAC’s throughput is 1.48 times of RI-MAC’s.