In wireless sensor networks, power consumption is a critical issue. For our National Grid temperature measuring and monitoring project, energy harvesting is limited to provide sufficient power to temperature measuring nodes allocated throughout the entire grid substation site. To maintain longer lifetime of the entire network is especially important. Currently, various media access control (MAC) layer protocols use different energy scheduling methods to realize data transmission on wireless channel under noisy environment. Although they are efficient for data transfer, they have limitations on saving power consumption. This paper proposes a network design solution for efficiently managing the energy consumption of wireless sensor network, in which sleep scheduling and forwarding set choosing are improved. Network nodes choose their own sleep scheduling parameters adaptively. Nodes also select individual forwarding set according to a set of priority criteria. In addition, nodes have their backup nodes determined by a set of rules in order to handle critical events and in case of node failure. Overall, this scheme enhances MAC layer's ability to more efficiently control and lower network node energy consumption, leading to increased lifetime for the entire network. Omnet++ is used to run the network simulation. The results show advantages over other MAC protocols.