Generally, the traditional layered protocol architecture is used to design protocols for wireless sensor networks in which MAC and Routing protocols act independently and this may cause counteraction between them. Cross-layer protocols are known to be more efficient. In this paper, we present MAR-WSN, a MAC-aware Routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks, in which the next hop decisions are made based on the TDMA scheduling and the two-hop neighbourhood knowledge.
Coherent decisions in space, taken by the routing protocol, with those taken by the MAC protocol, in time, prove to be efficient against several metrics: delay, energy consumption and hop number. The simulationresults show good performance of our strategy in medium and high density networks compared to the state of the art.