Hierarchically-paired evolutionary MAC protocol for ubiquitous wireless sensor applications

In this paper, we propose a new type of unified medium access control (MAC) framework, referred to as hierarchically-paired evolutionary MAC (HiPERMAC) protocol, with both contention-based and reservation-based time scheduling for wireless sensor networks. It is designed especially for a single-frequency radio operation while inheriting all advantages of the cluster-based hierarchical topology, e.g., energy efficiency and flexibility in coverage extension. Our simulation results show that depending on the various application scenarios, energy consumption and throughput can be properly traded off by our unified MAC framework.