CL-MAC: A Cross-Layer MAC protocol for heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

In duty cycled MAC protocols, multi-packet, multi-flow and multi-hop traffic patterns experience significant latencies, which are partially due to duty cycling. Several cross-layer routing/MAC schemes have been proposed to mitigate this latency. However, they utilize routing information from a single flow and/or a single packet perspective, thus limiting their adaptation to varying traffic loads and patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel Cross-Layer MAC protocol (CL-MAC) for WSNs, to efficiently handle multi-packet, multi-hop and multi-flow traffic patterns while adapting to a wide range of traffic loads. CL-MAC’s scheduling is based on a unique structure of flow setup packets that efficiently utilize routing information to transmit multiple data packets over multiple multi-hop flows. Unlike other MAC protocols, supporting construction of multi-hop flows, CL-MAC considers all pending packets in the routing layer buffer and all flow setup requests from neighbors, when setting up a flow. This allows CL-MAC to make more informed scheduling decisions, reflecting the current network status, and dynamically optimize its scheduling mechanism accordingly. We evaluate CL-MAC through extensive ns-2 simulations and compare its performance to the state of the art, over various networks and for a wide variety of traffic loads and patterns. In all our experiments, CL-MAC substantially reduces end-to-end latency, increases delivery ratio while reducing the average energy consumed per packet delivered.