Wireless sensor network MAC protocols switch radios off periodically, employing the so-called duty cycle mechanism, in order to conserve battery power that would otherwise be wasted by energy-costly idle listening. In order to minimize the various negative side-effects of the original scheme, especially on latency and throughput, various improvements have been proposed. In this paper, we introduce a new MAC protocol called MAC2 (Multi-hop Adaptive with packet Concatenation-MAC) which combines three promising techniques into one protocol. Firstly, the idea to forward packets over multiple hops within one operational cycle as initially introduced in RMAC. Secondly, an adaptive method that adjusts the listening period according to traffic load minimizing idle listening. Thirdly, a packet concatenation scheme that not only increases throughput but also reduces power consumption that would otherwise be incurred by additional control packets. Furthermore, MAC~2 incorporates the idea of scheduling data transmissions with minimum latency, thereby performing packet concatenation together with the multi-hop transmission mechanism in a most efficient way. We evaluated MAC2 using the prominent network simulator ns-2 and the results show that our protocol can outperform DW-MAC — a state of the art protocol both in terms of energy efficiency and throughput.
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