Y-mac: An energy-efficient multi-channel mac protocol for dense wireless sensor networks

As the use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) becomes widespread, node density tends to increase. This poses a new challenge for Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol design. Although traditional MAC protocols achieve low-power operation, they use only a single channel which limits their performance. Several multi-channel MAC protocols for WSNs have been recently proposed. One of the key observations is that these protocols are less energy efficient than single-channel MAC protocols under light traffic conditions. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient multi-channel MAC protocol, Y-MAC, for WSNs. Our goal is to achieve both high performance and energy efficiency under diverse traffic conditions. In contrast to most of previous multi-channel MAC protocols for WSNs, we implemented Y-MAC on a real sensor node platform and conducted extensive experiments to evaluate its performance. Experimental results show that Y-MAC is energy efficient and maintains high performance under high-traffic conditions