An Enhanced Multi-channel MAC Protocol with Intelligent Sleep Scheduling Capabilities for High Lifetime Smart City Networks

Medium access control (MAC) protocols are responsible for handling the interactions between different communication mediums. They perform tasks like frame delimitation, addressing of nodes, providing transparency to data communication, protection against errors, etc. In this paper an improved MAC protocol design is proposed, which hybridizes MAC protocols like Time division multiple access (TDMA), bit-map-assisted (BMA) and sensor MAC (SMAC), and then adds multi-channel capabilities to it in order to improve the network Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. The proposed protocol also incorporates sleep scheduling capabilities to the hybridized multi-channel MAC protocol in order to further optimize the network lifetime, and reduce routing computational complexity. The proposed protocol is compared with non-hybridized implementations of standard MAC protocols, and it is observed that a delay reduction of more than 20% is achieved, along with an improvement of 10% in the overall network lifetime, which can be used for sustainable development in smart cities that require low energy.