Energy efficient MAC protocol for delay-sensitive data transmission over wireless sensor network

This paper presents an energy efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol for delay‐sensitive data transmission over wireless sensor network. In general, energy consumption and delay depend on channel monitoring interval (CMI) and data sensing period at each sensor node. Based on this fact, we propose a new preamble structure to effectively advertise CMI and avoid the overhearing problem. In order to pursue an effective tradeoff between energy consumption and delay, we also develop a CMI determining algorithm that searches for a sub‐optimal solution with a low computational complexity in a distributive way. Finally, experimental results are provided to compare the proposed MAC protocol with existing sensor MAC protocols. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This paper proposes an energy efficient MAC protocol for delay‐sensitive data transmission over wireless sensor network. The proposed protocol with the short preamble structure and the CMI determining algorithm pursues an effective tradeoff between energy consumption and delay.