An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol Based on Routing Information for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, one of the most significant traffic pattern is data gathering from sensor nodes to sink through multi-hop data-delivery tree. For such pattern, this paper presents EBRI-MAC(Energy-efficient MAC protocol Based on Routing Information), in which the idea of a parent node and its child nodes forming a virtual cluster based on the data-delivery tree is introduced, and a medium access mechanism of a chain-invitation combined CSMA/CA and a period sleep mechanism of synchronization within each virtual cluster are designed in order to save energy. Considering the major sources of energy waste, a performance parameter is defined to evaluate energy-efficient, and theoretical analysis is performed. With ns-2 simulation results，it is verified that EBRI-MAC can win better energy-efficient performance than IEEE802.11 DCF and S-MAC under the traffic pattern of each node being time-correlated.