The thesis proposes a three-tier architecture wireless sensor network to monitor the environment of wide rural area. To enhance the network throughput, a multichannel MAC, 2HCR, is developed. The performance of 2HCR is examined for both single and bidirectional traffics. For the bidirectional traffic, a simple priority support scheme is proposed to give a priority for command traffic. Also, a procedure to estimate the throughput of multihop networks is developed to be used in network design
