A Dynamic Contention MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Research in the area of Wireless Sensor Networks has taken tremendous growth due to its wide applications spanning from health monitoring, environmental monitoring and tactical systems. The tiny nodes equipped with low batter power and computation power collaborate to sense the parameters and communicate to the base station. The contention in the channel demands the design of efficient MAC protocols that can save the battery power and reduce the data loss during transmission while are used in various fields. Medium Access Control (MAC) Protocols, are at the lower layers of WSNs' protocol stack. They have a greater influence on performance and energy consumption of the network. Sensor MAC (SMAC) is one of the oldest and most widely used MAC protocol for WSN. There exists few variations of SMAC, but still the research is going on to modify this protocol in order to support real time traffic while making it more energy efficient. The current work plans to find the drawbacks of SMAC and to make it more energy efficient.