MCAS-MAC: A multichannel asynchronous scheduled MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Due to their energy efficiency, many duty cycling-based MAC protocols have been proposed in WSNs. Although these protocols considerably reduce energy consumption by minimizing idle listening and overhearing, the energy efficiency comes at the cost of decreased packet delivery ratio and increased delay. In this paper, we present a multichannel asynchronous scheduled MAC protocol, called MCAS-MAC, which inherits the basic asynchronous scheduling operation from AS-MAC and adds back-to-back packet transmissions and multichannel support for high traffic dense WSN. Using RaPTEX, we evaluate the performance of MCAS-MAC by comparing it with existing duty cycling MAC protocols including BMAC, SMAC and AS-MAC.