Comparison of Sensor-MAC (S-MAC), Timeout-MAC (T-MAC), Berkeley-MAC (B-MAC), and Modified ML-MAC ( \(\text {M}^2\) L-MAC) for Wireless Sensor Networks

Synchronous medium access control (MAC) protocols are crucial in wireless sensor networks since they provide energy-efficient data exchanges. This study introduces a modified multi-layer MAC protocol to optimize network lifetime, energy consumption, throughput, and latency of the network. In this article, the nodes inside each wireless subnet are partitioned into five levels by randomly distributing one-fifth of the nodes from each subnet to each layer. In this, initially, the nodes specified in all layers i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are in a dormant state. When the communication process begins, the nodes specified in layer 1 switch to an active state, while the nodes in other layers remain in a dormant state. In a similar fashion, when the nodes in layer 2 communicate, the nodes in the alternate layers i.e. 1, 3, 4, and 5 remain inactive. This active and inactive state is carried out throughout the entire process for all the successor layers assumed in the proposed method. The utilization of sensor nodes in the modified ML-MAC protocol is characterized by a significantly limited duration of listening/active periods, which effectively mitigates energy consumption during the communication process. The protocol is implemented and simulated using MATLAB. When compared to the different MAC protocols, our proposed modified ML-MAC protocol shows considerable improvements in network lifespan, latency, energy consumption, and throughput.