140 AE-MAC: An Adaptive and Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Delay-Tolerant Mobile Sensor Networks

Conventional MAC protocols for wireless sensor network perform poorly when faced with a delay-tolerant mobile network environment. Characterized by a highly dynamic and sparse topology, poor network connectivity as well as data delay-tolerance, delay-tolerant mobile sensor networks exacerbate the severe power constraints and memory limitations of nodes. This paper proposes a simple and effective MAC protocol dubbed AE-MAC according to the characteristics of the delay tolerant sensor networks. AE-MAC introduces a data transfer scheme initiated by the sinker in order to implement the effective transmission, reduce the transmission fail rate, thus improve the performance of energy saving , throughput and latency. Also, an adaptive strategy to achieve energy efficiency is introduced in AE-MAC. The experiments show that comparing with the traditional MAC protocols, AE-MAC consumes less energy, reduces the one hop delay and increases the throughput in the highly dynamic networks.