Analysis and Design of MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are very useful in telecommunication fields as they are capable of storing and processing the data using less energy and hardware. Currently, these networks are using in many real world problems that are why it always offers a great research area to work. These networks consist of small sensor nodes, these sensor nodes are used in many applications such as health care monitoring, disaster detection, temperature monitoring, machine surveillance, and soil moisture checking etc. Routing protocol and Medium Access Protocol plays an important role in the efficient delivery of data and efficient utilization of a channel in WSNs. In real time, the Certain level of QoS(Quality of Services) is required in any Network for efficient and cost effective utilization. These QoS parameters such as Packet delivery ratio(PDR), End to end delay, Throughput, Energy consumption, Jitter, control overhead, Packet loss, and Bandwidth utilization, defines the performance of the particular protocol.
In this work, We compare the MAC protocols such as sensor medium access control protocol(SMAC), Timeout medium access control protocol(TMAC) and IEEE 802.15.4 with respect to packet rate and a number of nodes. This comparison shows which protocol is best in which condition. The performance of protocols is measured with respect to QoS parameters such as Packet delivery ratio, End to end delay, Throughput, and Energy consumption per node. We Proposed an Adaptive MAC protocol which is used to handle variable traffic. The practical application of this protocol is to detect the volcano eruption and transfer the information in normal as well as in emergency conditions. This protocol shows more than 80% PDR in all the conditions. We also proposed a multi-channel MAC protocol, which divides the channel in control and data parts. The parallel working of data and control channel help to increase the PDR and reduce the delay. This multi-channel protocol gives better result as compared to the single channel protocol according to the simulation results.