Bio-inspired Medium Access Control for Wireless Sensor Networks

This thesis studies the applications of biologically inspired algorithms and behaviours to the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). By exploring the similarity between a general communications channel and control engineering theory, we propose a simple method to control transmissions that we refer to as transmission delay. We use this concept and create a protocol inspired by Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) to optimise the communications. The lessons learned from this protocol inspires us to move closer to behaviours found in nature and the Emergence MAC (E-MAC) protocol is presented. The E-MAC protocol shows emergent behaviours arising from simple interactions and provides great throughput, low end-to-end delay and high fairness. Enhancements to this protocol are later proposed. We empirically evaluate these protocols and provide relevant parameter sweeps to show their performance. We also provide a theoretical approach to proving the settling properties of E-MAC. The presented protocols and methods provide a different approach towards MAC in WSNs