Performance of a Receiver-Initiated X-MAC Protocol for Tree-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes a new MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks with receiver initiation and tree topology for low latency, which is called TRIX-MAC. TRIX-MAC improves energy efficiency by exploiting the receiver-initiated scheme which minimizes nodes' energy consumption. In conventional sensor network applications, the sensed data disseminated from source nodes to a sink node forms a unidirectional tree. The properties of tree topology are also exploited to reduce the likelihood of contention and collisions between frames sent by children nodes. We use the network simulator to evaluate the performance of MAC protocols including the proposed protocol in terms of latency, throughput and energy-efficiency. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs better than prior approaches such as X-MAC, RIX-MAC and PW-MAC, especially in the case of the correlated traffic model, random correlated environment (RCE).