An adaptive energy-efficient and low-latency MAC for data gathering in wireless sensor networks

Summary form only given. In many sensor network applications the major traffic pattern consists of data collected from several source nodes to a sink through a unidirectional tree. We propose DMAC, an energy efficient and low latency MAC that is designed and optimized for such data gathering trees in wireless sensor networks. We first show that previously proposed MAC protocols for sensor networks that utilize activation/sleep duty cycles suffer from a data forwarding interruption problem, whereby not all nodes on a multihop path to the sink are notified of data delivery in progress, resulting in significant sleep delay. DMAC is designed to solve the interruption problem and allow continuous packet forwarding…