A Review of Multi-Channel Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are witnessing a momentum spread especially with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Indeed, WSNs are considered as the main enabling infrastructure for IoT networks. Nowadays, the emerging WSNs applications require not only long network lifespan but also considerably high data rate. Consequently, conceiving Multichannel MAC protocols that save the scarceenergy budget of sensor nodes while providing high network throughput is crucial for the emerging WSNs applications. In this paper, a thorough review of recent multichannel MAC protocols is provided along with a classification framework to deeply understand the design aspects for each protocol.

QMMAC: Quorum-Based Multichannel MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, energy conservation is a critical task. Thus, it is crucial to design an effective MAC protocol that minimizes energy consumption while guaranteeing high network throughput and low delay. In this article, we propose a quorum-based multichannel MAC protocol (QMMAC) for corona-based WSNs. QMMAC utilizes the multichannel communication feature and the quorum concept to greatly increase the throughput while conserving energy. The aim of this protocol is to allow each node and all its forwarders to wake up at the same time while avoiding collision and overhearing by separating their simultaneous communications using the multichannel feature. More precisely, the main idea of QMMAC is twofold. First, QMMAC wakeup scheduling is designed to minimize the end-to-end delay by allowing nodes to wake up at exactly the same time as their potential forwarders, whereas nodes that are not acting as forwarders for each other wake up at a completely different time, and thus overhearing, idle listening and collisions are avoided. Second, channel assignment, which also uses the concept of quorums, is used to share data channels so that there is no conflict or additional packet exchange required to negotiate the availability of channels. Thus, the end-to-end delay is further minimized as well as collisions between conflicting neighbors are avoided. Simulation results indicate that the network performance is improved by QMMAC in terms of energy efficiency, throughput and end-to-end delay.

Scheduling and adaptive listening approaches in MAC for WSN applications: A survey

False data detection, intrusion detection and coverage rate are major challenges in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Scheduling in media access control (MAC) using gateway and relay nodes solve some of the problems. In this paper, we carried out a brief survey on scheduling, delay aware MAC, cooperative communications in MAC, and adaptive listening to keep controlling the energy in sensors. In addition, multichannel MAC and various routing strategy techniques for WSN are discussed. Firefly algorithm for dynamic scheduling pipelined scheduling for linear sensor networks gives better throughput and latency. Heuristic configuration solves the overhearing problem, as node power-based MAC controls power of each node. Based on WSN applications and the performance metrics concentrated, various techniques for MAC are discussed throughout in this paper.