Low Overhead MAC Protocol for Low Data Rate Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract EN

We propose the low overhead media access control protocol (LO-MAC), a new low latency, energy efficient MAC protocol for low data rate wireless sensor networks.

LO-MAC uses both duty cycling and multihop forwarding from the routing-enhanced MAC protocol (RMAC) to reduce idle listening and sleep latency, respectively.

Besides that, LO-MAC introduces a traffic-adaptive mechanism, which is based on the fact that a node can sense a busy channel within its carrier sensing range.

This mechanism uses carrier sensing as a binary signal, and effectively notifies nodes of the existence of a data packet.

The nodes then either keep their radios on to take part in multihop data forwarding or turn them off to save energy.

Moreover, LO-MAC takes full advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless communication and lets a packet have different meanings when it is in transmission range of different nodes.

In LO-MAC, not only is a request-to-send/clear-to-send pair replaced with a Pioneer (PION) packet, as in RMAC, but also a data packet can play both data and acknowledgement functions.

Therefore, control overhead and overhearing energy are significantly reduced.

Our simulation results show that LO-MAC outperforms RMAC in terms of energy efficiency while achieving comparable end-to-end latency.