Abstract
Since wireless sensor networks are broadly used in various areas, there have been a number of protocols developed to satisfy specific constraints of each application. The most important and common requirements regardless of application types are to provide a long network lifetime and small end-to-end delay. In this paper, we propose Early Preamble MAC (EP-MAC) with improved energy conservation and low latency. It is based on CMAC but adopts a new preamble type called 'early preamble'. In EP-MAC, a transmitting node can find quickly when a next receiving node wakes up, so EP-MAC enables direct data forwarding in the next phase. From numerical analysis, we show that EP-MAC improves energy consumption and latency greatly compared to CMAC. We also implemented EP-MAC with NS-2, and through extensive simulation, we confirmed that EP-MAC outperforms CMAC.