Efficient medium access control for wireless sensor networks

An efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol is critical for the performance of a wireless sensor network (WSN), especially in terms of energy consumption. In this work we discuss the efficiency of S-MAC, a well-known MAC protocol for WSNs, and propose an improvement on the protocol. Via an extensive simulation study considering the cases of both a simple linear topology and a complicated tree topology used for structural health monitoring, the performance evaluation of the enhanced protocol shows that it outperforms the original version of S-MAC in energy conservation.