An Energy and Delay Efficient Hybrid MAC Protocol for Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose an energy efficient hybrid MAC protocol for multi-hop wireless sensor networks. The proposed MAC protocol used a hybrid mechanism, in which contention-based MAC protocol and contention free MAC protocol are combined. The sensor nodes located far from the sink node usually send few data packet since they try to send measured data by themselves. So contention-based MAC protocol is useful among them. But other nodes located near sink node usually have lots of data packets since they plays as a relay node. Contention-based MAC protocol among them is not suitable. Using contention-based MAC protocol in heavy data traffic environment, packet collisions and transmission delay may increase. In this paper, slot assignment between sender nodes by sink node is used. The proposed mechanism is efficient in energy and latency. Results showed that our MAC protocol outperformed other protocol in terms of data packet delivery delay and energy consumption.