PR-MAC: Path-Oriented Real-Time MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network

摘要

This paper proposes a Path-oriented Real-time Medium Access Control (PR-MAC) protocol for sensor networks to guarantee the bounded delay of data transmission. PR-MAC removes sleep delay with a Bidirectional Pipelining Schedule (BPS) algorithm, and reduces communication delay caused by contention with a multi-channel communication mechanism. BPS enables a node to wake twice during a work cycle so as to support bidirectional data transmission. In either direction, the nodes along a path wake up sequentially. The multi-channel mechanism allocates a special channel for each communication path so that multiple simultaneous events will not interfere with one another. The data delay and energy consumption of PR-MAC is compared with those of S-MAC and DMAC. We implement the prototype of PR-MAC on the ns-2 simulator. Experiments showed PR-MAC performs better than S-MAC in reducing the transmission delay of both data and control message.