An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol with Lightweight and Adaptive Scheduling for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a light-weight and adaptive scheduling-based media access control protocol (LASMAC) for wireless sensor networks. Our primary goal is to achieve an energy-efficient and traffic-adaptive TDMA-based MAC protocol with low-overhead slot reservation. In our protocol, each node dynamically and flexibly assigns slots by exchanging information on the number of slots it wants to send within neighbors by contention-based access. The overhead of control packets in slot reservation is reduced. In addition, the duration of active period in random access for slot reservation is dynamically changed based on the traffic. Performance evaluation by simulation shows that our proposed MAC protocol is more energy-efficient than previous methods keeping throughput under hotspot traffic