A comprehensive study of Medium Access Contro...

A comprehensive study of Medium Access Control Protocols in Wireless Sensor Network

Author Name : Sangeeta, Mr. Rajesh Parihar

ABSTRACT Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have a broad range of applications. Since sensor nodes are battery powered and have therefore limited energy resource, keeping the network operational over long periods of time is challenging. Replacement of the batteries on sensor nodes is either highly cumbersome or impractical. In most of the WSN applications, the major expenditure on energy consumption comes from data communication. Therefore, energy efficient communication, especially the role of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols becomes very important. Generally, traffic load in WSNs is very small and therefore the radio does not necessarily need to be active all the time. In an ideal case for conserving energy, sensor nodes switch on the radios only for data transmission/reception and turn them off when there is no traffic in the network. While it is easy to define when data transmission is required, reception is usually unpredictable to a sensor node. Sensor nodes therefore, need to listen to the channel periodically in anticipation of potential packets.