Survey and Analysis of Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network
Suchita Jogi · IOSR Journal of Computer Engineering · 2013
Wireless sensor networks are appealing to researchers due to their wide range of application in several fields such as military settings, critical infrastructure protection, target detection and tracking, environmental monitoring, industrial process monitoring etc. Communication among wireless sensor nodes is usually achieved by means of a unique channel.It is the characteristic of this channel that only a single node can transmit a message at any given time.Therefore, shared access of the channel requires the establishment of a MAC protocol among the sensor nodes.The objective of the MAC protocol is to regulate access to the shared wireless medium.For sensor nodes that are battery powered, it is sometimes difficulty or impractical to charge or replace exhausted battery.So the medium access protocol (MAC) for wireless sensor network must be energy efficient.In this paper, we outline the sensor network properties that are crucial for the design of MAC layer protocols.Then, describe four MAC protocols proposed for sensor networks emphasizing their strengths and weaknesses and compared those protocols.Analysis of power consumption and latency performance for these four MAC protocol is also shown in this report.