Towards a schedule based MAC protocol with QoS provisioning for sensor networks
Kazi Ashrafuzzaman, Kyung Sup Kwak · 2010
Some variants of wireless sensor networks, exemplified by medical sensor networks, can have applications where network traffic can almost entirely be comprised of centrally configurable uplink flows in a single piconet. With such paradigm in sight, we propose a framework for medium access control (MAC) protocols meant for exploiting the underlying centralized scheduling opportunity. A coordinator takes on the role of marshaling the wireless resources in its piconet; in a collision-free scheme, it schedules the time slots for each superframe based on the Quality-of-Service (QoS) specifications of nodes with additional provision for channel access for rare yet critical emergency data. In a preliminary study, we show the impact of some system parameters specific to this framework on delay incurred and energy absorbed in the network.