Cross layer-based MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs ), one of the important challenges is to achieve a satisfactory network lifetime while meeting quality of service requirements. A number of energy efficient protocols have been proposed, mostly based on a layered design approach, which means that they are focused on designing optimal strategies for “single” layer only. In this paper, a novel cross layer-based MAC protocol abbreviated as CLMAC is proposed. In CLMAC, the interactions among MAC, Routing and Physical layers are fully exploited to reduce energy consumption and multi-hop delay of the data delivery for wireless sensor networks. More precisely, in CLMAC, the carrier-sensing technology in physical layer is applied to sense traffic and compulsorily wake up the neighbor nodes within multi-hops, so the data transmission over multi-hops can be realized during a single listen/sleep cycle, it can maximize a sleeping duration of each node under delay guarantee of the data delivery. Meanwhile through adopting routing layer information, CLMAC only make receiver of the next hop on the path of routing be adaptively waken up, Thus, it can reduce energy consumption of the nodes. Through the performance analysis and the simulation study using the NS-2, we evaluate the performance of CLMAC and prove its substantial advantages such as lower energy-consumption, lower latency and larger data throughput compared with ASMAC, especially in aspect of latency performance.