A Traffic Aware Demand-Wakeup MAC(TADW-MAC) Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we propose a traffic aware Demand Wakeup MAC(TADW-MAC) protocol, in which low data delay and high throughput can be achieved, for wireless sensor networks. With the TADW-MAC protocol, the problem of the DW-MAC protocol, which schedules only one packet to deliver during the Sleep period in a multi-hop transmission is resolved. DW-MAC is not adequate for the applications such as object tracking and fire detection, in which busty data should be transmitted in a limited time when an event occurs [6-8]. When an event occurs, duty cycle can be adjusted in the TADW-MAC protocol to get less energy consumption and low latency. The duty cycle mechanism has been widely used to save energy consumption of sensor node due to idle listening in wireless sensor networks. But additional delay in packet transmission may be increased in the mechanism. Our simulation results show that TADW-MAC outperforms RMAC and DW-MAC in terms of energy efficiency while achieving low latency.