RM-MAC: a reservation based multi-channel MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Convergecast is a general communication pattern of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in which sensed data is collected from outlying sensor nodes and is transmitted to a sink node. In this paper, we consider periodic convergecast, in which data packets are generated and transmitted repeatedly with a certain interval. To support the periodical packet delivery efficiently, we propose a reservation based multi-channel MAC protocol (RM-MAC) which employs a time reservation mechanism. Periodical packet delivery allows receiver nodes to recognize when the next packet is transmitted, which makes the nodes reserve the time for the next packet transmission. Consequently, our proposed mechanism can guarantee minimum delivery latency from source nodes to a sink node. Furthermore, RM-MAC provides a collision resolution mechanism which coordinates the reserved periodical transmissions among multiple sender nodes. It can prevent repeated collisions caused by the multiple-senders-single-receiver problem. We implement RM-MAC by using an ns-2 simulator to compare its performance with other protocols. The simulation results show that RM-MAC outperforms existing protocols in terms of energy efficiency and packet delivery latency.