A Survey on Mac Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks
R. Anubhama, T. Rajendran · Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems · 2017
Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an infrastructure-less wireless network of nodes that can sense the environment or physical conditions and relay the data to a sink or a gateway possibly through multiple hops.The primary task of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in such a network is to synchronize the task of data communication between the nodes with energy efficiency being the prime consideration due to power constraints in sensor nodes.So the most significant performance specifications for MAC protocols in WSN are throughput, efficiency, stability, fairness, low access delay, low transmission delay and low overhead.In this paper we have surveyed significant classes of MAC protocols used in WSN and reviewed the merits and demerits of those protocols based on the aforementioned specifications.