A Novel Battery Aware MAC Protocol for Minimizing Energy × Latency in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) possess highly constrained energy resources. The existing Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for WSNs try to either minimize the energy consumption or the latency, which are conflicting objectives, or find a trade-off between them. They fail to achieve the minimum energy× latency, which ensures that transmission should occur such that both the energy consumption and latency are minimized. We propose a novel Battery-aware Energy-efficient MAC protocol to minimize the Latency (BEL-MAC) that exploits the chemical properties of the batteries of the sensor nodes, in order to increase their lifetime. Our protocol reduces the latency of the packets in an efficient manner without compromising on the lifetime of the network. We compare our protocol with the SMAC, DSMAC, TMAC, and IEEE 802.11 MAC, in terms of throughput and latency and show that our protocol outperforms these existing protocols, in terms of energy× latency.