History-based MAC Protocol for Low Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks: the SLACK-MAC Protocol

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are increasingly used in environmental monitoring applications. They are designed to operate for several months by featuring low activity cycles in order to save energy. In this paper, we propose a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for such WSNs with very low duty-cycles of 1% and less. Nodes are activated randomly and use a history of previous successful frame exchanges to decide their next activation time. We study the choice of the history size, and we compare the performance of our protocol with other protocols from the literature. We show by simulations and real experiments that with a limited history size of only six entries, our protocol achieves better performance than other protocols from the literature, while keeping the advantages of fully asynchronous protocols.