A Retransmission-Enhanced Duty-Cycle MAC Protocol Based on the Channel Quality for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Duty cycle MAC protocols have been proposed for wire less sensor networks (WSNs) to reduce the energy consumed by idle listening but they introduce significant end to end delivery latency Several works have attempted to mitigate this latency but they still have a problem on handling the packet loss The quality of the wireless channel in WSNs is quite bad so packets are frequently lost In this letter we present a novel duty cycle MAC protocol called REMAC (Retransmission Enhanced duty cycle MAC) which exploits both the network layer and the physical layer information REMAC estimates the quality of the wireless channel and properly reserves the wireless channel to handle the packet loss It can reduce the end to end packet delivery latency caused by the packet loss without sacrificing the energy efficiency Simulation results show that REMAC outperforms RMAC in terms of the end to end packet delivery latency