Medium Access Control in Wireless Sensor Networks: Contemporary Design Issues and Future Research Directions
Talha Rasheed, Yuanzhu Peter Chen, Octavia A. Dobre, Mohamed H. Ahmed · 2010
The design of Medium Access Control (MAC) in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) hugely impacts the overall network performance and efficiency. MAC in WSNs has therefore been a very active area of research and the literature is filled with a wide array of designs and propositions. Ironically, only a few of them have been eventually utilized in real-world deployments. We investigate the reasons for this disparity by surveying the protocols from the literature and analyzing the characteristics of the real-world deployments. While the need for application-centric designs in certain situations is appreciated and is sometimes inevitable, we present frameworks to narrow this gulf and enable some level of generality at the MAC layer. Furthermore, it is envisioned that future sensor network applications will impose heavier demands on the MAC layer designs. Existing protocols are deemed not to be able to warrant efficient network operation. Hence, research directions for the design, simulation, and experimentation of MAC protocols in view of the foreseen scenarios have been put forward.