DW-MAC: A low latency, energy efficient demand-wakeup MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Duty cycling is a widely used mechanism in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to reduce energy consumption due to idle listening, but this mechanism also introduces additional latency in packet delivery. Several schemes have been proposed to mitigate this latency, but they are mainly optimized for light traffic loads. A WSN, however, could often experience bursty and high traffic loads, such as due to broadcast or convergecast traffic. In this paper, we present a new MAC protocol, called Demand Wakeup MAC (DW-MAC), that introduces a new low-overhead scheduling algorithm that allows nodes to wake up on demand during the Sleep period of an operational cycle and ensures that data transmissions do not collide at their intended receivers. This demand wakeup adaptively increases effective channel capacity during an operational cycle as traffic load increases, allowing DW-MAC to achieve low delivery latency under a wide range of traffic loads including both unicast and broadcast traffic. We compare DW-MAC with S-MAC (with and without adaptive listening) and with RMAC using ns-2 and show that DW-MAC outperforms these protocols, with increasing benefits as traffic load increases. For example, under high unicast traffic load, DW-MAC reduces delivery latency by 70% compared to S-MAC and RMAC, and uses only 50% of the energy consumed with S-MAC with adaptive listening. Under broadcast traffic, DW-MAC reduces latency by more than 50% on average while maintaining higher energy efficiency.