A Low Control Overhead Big Slot Scheduling MAC Protocol for Reducing Competition in Wireless Sensor Networks
Zhenqiang Wei, Hoon Oh · 2017
A MAC protocol for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) should deal with data transmission in a timely, reliable, and energy-efficient manner. For reliability, various factors of interference existent in the environment are considered. While using TDMA, one approach uses CSMA/CA in data transmission in which a sender uses control messages to acquire a channel before transmitting data packet and the receiver replies an acknowledgement to validate the successful data reception. It is necessary to reduce the number of control messages to reduce the possibility of collision. Thus, a receiver-initiated data transmission method is proposed to reduce the number of control messages as well as the number of competing nodes. Since this approach works well when data transmission can be predicted, it is applied to a MAC protocol which uses a level-order transmission in a tree topology named BigMAC. Simulation results show that the proposed method conduces to improving reliability obviously and reducing control overhead significantly, leading to the reduced power consumption.