An energy-efficient, transport-controlled MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), one major cause of wasted energy is that the wireless network interface is always on to accept possible traffic. Many medium access control (MAC) protocols therefore adopted a periodic listen-and-sleep scheme to save energy, at sacrifice of end-to-end latency and throughput. Another cause is packet dropping due to network congestion, necessitating a lightweight transport protocol for WSNs. In this paper, we suggest a transport-controlled MAC protocol (TC-MAC) that combines the transport protocol into the MAC protocol with the aims of achieving high performance as well as energy efficiency in multi-hop forwarding. Although TC-MAC also works through a periodic listen-and-sleep scheme, it lowers end-to-end latency by reserving data forwarding schedules across multi-hop nodes during the listen period and by forwarding data during the sleep period, all while increasing throughput by piggybacking the subsequent data forwarding schedule on current data transmissions and forwarding data consecutively. In addition, TC-MAC gives a fairness-aware lightweight transport control mechanism based on benefits of using the MAC-layer information. The results show that TC-MAC performs as well as an 802.11-like MAC in end-to-end latency and throughput, and is more efficient than S-MAC in energy consumption, with the additional advantage of supporting fairnessaware congestion control. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.