A Cross Layer Approach for Energy Efficient MAC Layer in Wireless Sensor Networks

MAC layer design is critical for energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks. We present an approach to reduce the time spending on data moving. In our approach, a MAC layer needs to stripe off the network layer header and store a data frame received until receiving the next hop address from the network layer where a route look-up is executed. The amount of data moving drops a lot by only passing the fields necessary to the network layer for processing and finding a route. In this way, the nodal processing time drops dramatically and thus energy consumption is reduced accordingly. The end-to-end delay can be reduced with the decrease of nodal processing time as well. Our approach is simple and effective. We can integrate this cross layer approach with any other MAC protocols without any difficulty.