AE-MAC: AN ADAPTIVE AND ENERGY-EFFICIENT MAC PROTOCOL FOR DELAY-TOLERANT MOBILE SENSOR NETWORKS

Conventional MAC protocols for wireless sensor network perform poorly when faced with a delay-tolerant mobile network environment. Characterized by a highly dynamic and sparse topology, poor network connectivity as well as data delay-tolerance, delay-tolerant mobile sensor networks exacerbate the severe power constraints and memory limitations of nodes. This paper proposes a simple and effective MAC protocol dubbed AE-MAC according to the characteristics of the delay tolerant sensor networks. AE-MAC introduces a data transfer scheme initiated by the sinker in order to implement the effective transmission, reduce the transmission fail rate, thus improve the performance of energy saving, throughput and latency. Also, an adaptive strategy to achieve energy efficiency is introduced in AE-MAC. The experiments show that comparing with the traditional MAC protocols, AE-MAC consumes less energy, reduces the one hop delay and increases the throughput in the highly dynamic networks.