A New Wireless Sensor Network MAC Protocol: NSMAC

Abstract How to reduce energy consumption and improve the life cycle is one of the hot spot issues in current wireless sensor network research. Media Access Control (MAC) has an important impact on sensor network life cycle and performance. This paper proposes a new MAC protocol--NSMAC protocol. This protocol dynamically changes the length of the contention window and the size of the duty cycle based on the load on the network. It can effectively reduce energy consumption, improve network throughput capacity, and improve sleep time-delay in a multi-hop network environment when the network load is large. The experimental results also prove that this protocol has significant improvement in energy consumption, time-delay and throughput capacity compared to SMAC protocol and RCMAC protocol.