A Cross-layer Contention Based Synchronous MAC Protocol for Transmission Delay Reduction in Multi-Hop WSNs

Recently designed cross-layer contention based synchronous MAC protocols like the PRMAC protocol, for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enable a node to schedule multi-hop transmission of multiple data packets in a cycle. However, these systems accommodate both the request-to-send data process and the confirmation-to-send data process in the same data transmission scheduling window (i.e. data window). This reduces the length of the multi-hop flow setup in the data window. In a multi-hop scenario, this degrades both the packet delivery ratio (PDR) and the end-to-end transmission delay (E2ETD). In this paper, we propose a cross-layer contention based synchronous MAC protocol, which accommodates the request-to-send data process in the data window and the confirmation-to-send data process in the sleep window for increased efficiency. We evaluate our proposed protocol through ns-2.35 simulations and compare its performance with the PRMAC protocol. Results suggest that in multi-hop scenario, proposed protocol outperforms PRMAC both in terms of the E2ETD and the packet delivery ratio (PDR).