Handling Cross Traffic Bursts in Wireless Sensor Networks with Multi-Hop Multi-Channel Wakeup Reservation

摘要

Duty-cycle MAC protocols achieve high energy-efficiency. However, duty-cycle MACs introduce significant end-to-end delivery latency. Recently proposed protocols such as RMAC and PRMAC improve the latency of duty-cycle MAC protocols by employing a mechanism of multi-hop wakeup reservation to allow a packet to be forwarded over multiple hops in a single communication cycle. However, these protocols can not efficiently handle cross traffic bursts which are common in applications with space-correlated event detection. If there are multiple packets to send in each flow, most of the data packets will be seriously postponed. This paper proposes a multi-channel pipelined routing-enhanced MAC protocol, called MPR-MAC, to handle this problem. By jointly employing channel diversity and time diversity, MPR-MAC allows cross data flows to forward multiple packets respectively in a single communication cycle without interfering with each other. Simulation results show the advantage of MPR-MAC in handling cross data flows and the significant performance upgrade in terms of end-to-end latency and energy efficiency.