A MAC Protocol based on Hi.erarchical Virtual Clusters
Doo-sung Back, Kihyun Pyun · Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information · 2009
Environmental monitoring applications measure temporature, humidity, and pollution degrees of large areas periodically and are essential for ubiquitous society. In this paper, we propose a sensor network MAC protocol that is applicable to environmental monitoring applications. The proposing MAC protocol has scalability by constructing multiple groups of sensor nodes as in SMAC protocol. Differently from SMAC protocol, however, ours have hierarchical structure between adjacent groups. Data transmission schedules are efficient since lower groups are synchronized to higher groups. Thus. the end-to-end delays and energy consumption can be reduced due to sequential transmission schedules. But since the nodes within the same group are synchronized to themselves. they have good adaptability and scalability compared to existing hierarchical approaches such as DMAC. We show by simulations that the proposing MAC protocol is superior to SMAC for environmental monitoring applications.