Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Study

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is an interconnection of different sensor nodes deployed over geographical areas to communicate with each other and guiding the information of target to base station via sensor and sink nodes [1]. For exploiting the prospective benefits of WSNs requires a high-level of self-organization into a multi-hop wireless network, proficiency and coordination among the sensors to accomplish the jobs required to upkeep the underlying application. For multi-hop wireless network to work requires neighboring sensor nodes to communicate with each other through air in form of electromagnetic signal. All sensor nodes must share this common transmission medium in aunbiased and rational manner. This paper discusses the overview and fundamental design issue of Medium Access Protocol used in shared medium

Power Saving MAC Protocols for WSNs and Optimization of S-MAC Protocol

Low power MAC protocols have received a lot of consideration in the last few years because of their influence on the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. Since, sensors typically operate on batteries, replacement of which is often difficult. A lot of work has been done to minimize the energy expenditure and prolong the sensor lifetime through energy efficient designs, across layers. Meanwhile, the sensor network should be able to maintain a certain throughput in order to fulfill the QoS requirements of the end user, and to ensure the constancy of the network. This paper introduces different types of MAC protocols used for WSNs and proposes S‐MAC, a Medium‐Access Control protocol designed for Wireless Sensor Networks. S‐MAC uses a few innovative techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self‐ configuration. A new protocol is suggested to improve the energy efficiency, latency and throughput of existing MAC protocol for WSNs. A modification of the protocol is then proposed to eliminate the need for some nodes to stay awake longer than the other nodes which improves the energy efficiency, latency and throughput and hence increases the life span of a wireless sensor networ

An efficient MAC protocol based on hybrid superframe for Wireless Sensor Networks

The usage of wireless channels is based on Media Access Control (MAC) protocols, which allocate wireless resources and control the way that sensors access a shared radio channel to communicate with their neighbors. Designing low energy consumption, high efficiency MAC protocols is one of the most important directions in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). So far, MAC protocols in WSN are usually divided into two categories: contention-based MAC protocols and schedule-based MAC protocols. However, both protocols have their own advantages and disadvantages that sometimes it is hard to decide which one is better than the other one. A hybrid protocol is concerned a lot now in WSN, which is IEEE 802.15.4. It integrates the advantages of both contention-based and schedule-based mechanisms. However, this protocol has some improving spaces as well, which motivated us to further study it and proposed a new contention reserve MAC protocol, named CRMAC, under the inspiration of IEEE 802.15.4's superframe structure. Through a series of theoretical and simulation analysis, we show that CRMAC performs better in energy consumption, system delay and network throughput than IEEE 802.15.4 and LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy). CRMAC is especially suitable for short packet transmission under logy traffic networks, which is the main situation in WSN, so this protocol is practical in WSN

A Simple and Efficient MAC-Routing Integrated Algorithm for Sensor Network

Abstract—In sensor network the minimization of the power consumption is a fundamental key. Considering network with a number of wireless sensor spanning from hundreds to thousands, the complexity of the communication algorithm drives both the hardware requirement and the whole network cost. This paper is devoted to present a new communication algorithm able to merge the MAC and the routing mechanisms into a single layer. In such an algorithm each node has knowledge of its location and it uses this information in order to take decision on the path to reach the destination. The nodes has a sleeping capability to save energy, and an active node with pending packet selects, from the listening nodes in its coverage area, the best relay with respect to a given merit factor based on the distance to the destination and the remaining energy in such a relay. All the nodes are not coordinated and possible collisions during the relay selection may force to have a suboptimal relay use. In the paper this algorithm is described, analyzed and some simulation are performed in order to show its effectiveness. This system uses a single radio resource while a similar method proposed in Literature uses a busy tone approach with two radios and a different relay selection algorithm. Some comparisons with this more complex method is reported showing that the performance are very close in practical environment configuration, even if the complexity of our proposal is less