Mitigating Starvation in Wireless Sensor Networks
Ajit Warrier, Jeongki Min, Injong Rhee · 2006
Wireless sensor nodes deployed in hostile network conditions are required to report events such as enemy movements quickly and reliably. Unfortunately, current CSMA-based MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks suffer from varying degrees of starvation. Such starvation could lead to significant portions of the sensed area being invisible to the sink. It has been shown by prior research that such starvation is caused due to spatial bias and CSMA-based channel access. In this experimental work, we study how the use of B-MAC, the default CSMA-based MAC protocol can be the cause of starvation in a 35 node multi-hop wireless sensor testbed. We then show that the use of Z-MAC, a hybrid MAC, can alleviate such starvation, while at the same time giving high channel utilization