Aggregated traffic flow weight controlled hierarchical MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

It has been discussed in the literature that the medium-access control (MAC) protocols, which schedule periodic sleep–active states of sensor nodes, can increase the longevity of sensor networks. However, these protocols suffer from very low end-toend throughput and increased end-to-end packet delay. How to design an energy-efficient MAC protocol that greatly minimizes the packet delay while maximizing the achievable data delivery rate, however, remains unanswered. In this paper, motivated by the manyto-one multihop traffic pattern of sensor networks and the heterogeneity in required data packet rates of different events, we propose an aggregated traffic flow weight controlled hierarchical MAC protocol (ATW-HMAC). We find that ATW-HMAC significantly decreases the packet losses due to collisions and buffer drops (i.e., mitigates the congestion), which helps to improve network throughput, energy efficiency, and end-to-end packet delay. ATW-HMAC is designed to work with both single-path and multipath routing. Our analytical analysis shows that ATW-HMAC provides weighted fair rate allocation and energy efficiency. The results of our extensive simulation, done in ns-2.30, show that ATW-HMAC outperforms S-MAC; traffic-adaptive medium access; and SC-HMAC. M. A. Razzaque · M. Mamun-Or-Rashid · M. M. Alam · C. S. Hong (B) Department of Computer Engineering, Kyung Hee University, 1, Seocheon-ri, Giheung-eup, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, 446-701, South Korea e-mail: [email protected] M. A. Razzaque e-mail: [email protected]