An MAC Protocol Design in Minimizing of Data Transmission Delay for Wireless Sensor Networks

The effective power consumption is the primary issue in a sensor network which consists of the sensor nodes with limited battery power. So, most of the MAC protocols in sensor networks have been designed with the consideration of energy efficiency. Generally, these protocols make use of the listen and sleep mode periodically. However, this approach inevitably causes a long transmission delay on the data forwarding path, which is mainly resulted from the sleep time of the receiver node. This paper deals with a design of DT-MAC(Data Transmission centric MAC) protocol, with minimizes the data transmission delay while it forces each node to consume its energy efficiently. Thus, a node received a packet converts its remained sleep time to the pseudo_listen time, in which the node is able to transmit a packet. With benefit of the pseudo_listen period, the data transmission delay along with the data forwarding path will be shortened as much as it possible. Therefore, DT-MAC protocol is very suitable to the various applications which require a real time sensing data such as disaster and fire alarm.