P-MAC: A Cross-Layer Duty Cycle MAC Protocol Towards Pipelining for Wireless Sensor Networks

Although the conventional duty cycle MAC protocols such as RMAC for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) perform well in terms of saving energy and reducing end-to-end delivery latency, the authors were designed independently and required an extra routing protocol in the network layer to provide path information for the MAC layer. They propose a novel cross-layer duty cycle MAC protocol with data forwarding towards pipeline feature (PMAC) for WSNs. P-MAC divides all sensor nodes in the network into different grades around the sink. Each node identifies its grade according to its logic hop distance to the sink and simultaneously establishes a sleep/wakeup schedule based on its grade.