DRMA-CR: Distributed reservation multiple access with consecutive requests for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a medium access control (MAC) protocol should be designed to enhance channel throughput, end to end delay, and energy efficiency under the multi-hop communication. This paper proposes a distributed reservation multiple access with consecutive requests (DRMA-CR) as an efficient MAC protocol to comply with these design requirements. This scheme reduces channel access overhead by successively delivering data via the path reservation using consecutive request strategy on the multi-hop path. In addition, it efficiently allocates channel resources to all nodes on the reserved path according to the expected interference range. Also, it enables automatic time synchronisation among nodes based on the time information carried in control packets. Furthermore, it emphasizes energy efficiency by following a repeated duty cycle with active and inactive operations during idle period, and by performing an inactive operation during unrelated data transmission period. In simulation, DRMA-CR shows superior performance in channel throughput, end to end delay and energy efficiency than CSMA/CA with a small or large interference ranges.