This letter presents VLA-MAC, a novel adaptive MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks that can achieve high energy efficiency and low latency in variable load conditions. In VLA-MAC, traffic load is measured online and utilized for adaptive adjustment. VLA-MAC transmits packets via a burst style to alleviate packets accumulation problem and achieve low latency in high load condition. Furthermore, it also saves obvious energy by removing unnecessary listen period in low load condition. Unlike current approach, VLA-MAC does not need to adjust duty-cycle according to load online. Simulation results based on ns-2 show the performance improvements of our protocol.

In this paper we propose MR-MAC, a new multiple reservation MAC protocol for asynchronous duty cycling wireless sensor networks. In MR-MAC, the receiver transmits a collection packet to the senders when it wakes up that asks for the number of packets each sender wants to send. Then each sender replies to the receiver according to the scheduled sequence with a short report packet. After getting the number of packets from each sender, the receiver assigns multiple batch transmission (MBT) for the senders and begins to initiate the transmissions. The senders then transmit packets to the receiver in a batch style as scheduled so that packets can be delivered to the receiver as fast as possible. Experiments on a Tmote-sky testbed show that our protocol outperforms other protocols in diverse performance metrics such as throughput, latency and energy efficiency.