A Low-Delay MAC(LD-MAC) protocol in Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks the Medium access control (MAC) protocol has many challenges to solve such as reducing energy consumption, supporting QoS(quality of service) fairness, and reducing delivery delay. This paper proposed a low-delay supporting MAC protocol in multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks. The proposed protocol uses the RB(rapid beacon) frame for reducing delivery delay. The RB frame is a modified IEEE 802.15.4 beacon frame. For sender adaptive-wakeup, the RB frame includes a seed number for determining of a receiver wakeup time. And for next hop receiver adaptive-wakeup, the RB frame includes the length of remaining data packet information. Results showed that our LD-MAC protocol outperformed other protocol in terms of data packet delivery delay.