LC-MAC: An Efficient MAC Protocol for the Long-Chain Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we present a new duty-cycle media access control(MAC) protocol, called Long-chain MAC protocol (LC-MAC), that exploits a mechanism for relay nodes booking in advance and transmitting in a burst manner in order to reduce the end-to-end delivery delay in a long-chain sensor network scenario without sacrificing energy efficiency. In LC-MAC, a super SYNC frame can travel across multiple hops and schedule the upcoming data packet delivery along the long-chain route. Each relay node sleeps and intelligently wakes up at a scheduled time, so that the upstream node can send the data packet to it and then it can immediately forwards the data packet to the downstream node. Our simulation results in ns-2 show that LC-MAC achieves significant improvement in end-to-end delivery delay over S-MAC without sacrificing energy efficiency or network throughput.