A Low-latency and Energy-efficient TDMA Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In order to solve the problem that BMA protocol has idle listening and large energy consumption, and E-BMA protocol has high latency of data transmission, a new MAC protocol named LL-BMA (Low-latency Bit-map-assisted) was proposed, which maintain high energy efficiency basically and reduce transmission latency significantly as well. To reduce idle listening of contention period and latency of data transmission, this protocol divided the process of node reserve data slot into two ways, making reservation through piggybacking and making reservation through contention period. We compared LL-BMA among TDMA, BMA and E-BMA, the result shows that LL-BMA protocol can compromise relationship of latency and energy efficiency, only a fraction of energy consumption can it reduce the latency of data transmission effectively.