SR-MAC: A low latency MAC protocol for multi-packet transmissions in wireless sensor networks

Event detection is one of the major applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Most of existing medium access control (MAC) protocols are mainly optimized for the situation under which an event only generates one packet on a single sensor node. When an event generates multiple packets on a single node, the performance of these MAC protocols degrades rapidly. In this paper, we present a new synchronous duty-cycle MAC protocol called SR-MAC for the event detection applications in which multiple packets are generated on a single node. SR-MAC introduces a new scheduling mechanism that reserves few time slots during the SLEEP period for the nodes to transmit multiple packets. By this approach, SR-MAC can schedule multiple packets generated by an event on a single node to be forwarded over multiple hops in one operational cycle without collision. We use event delivery latency (EDL) and event delivery ratio (EDR) to measure the event detection capability of the SR-MAC protocol. Through detailed ns-2 simulation, the results show that SR-MAC can achieve lower EDL, higher EDR and higher network throughput with guaranteed energy efficiency compared with R-MAC, DW-MAC and PR-MAC.