Emergency response MAC protocol (ER-MAC) for wireless sensor networks
Lanny Sitanayah, Cormac J. Sreenan, Kenneth N. Brown · 2010
We introduce ER-MAC, a hybrid MAC protocol for emergency response wireless sensor networks. ER-MAC is designed as a hybrid of the TDMA and CSMA approaches, giving it the flexibility to adapt to traffic and topology changes. It adopts a TDMA approach to schedule collision-free slots. Nodes wake up for their scheduled slots, but otherwise sleep to conserve energy. When an emergency occurs, nodes that participate in the emergency monitoring change their MAC behaviour by allowing contention in TDMA slots. Simulations in ns-2 show that ER-MAC outperforms Z-MAC with higher delivery ratio, lower latency, and lower energy consumption.