Title: Energy-efficient MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks: a survey

Authors: Farhana Afroz; Robin Braun

Addresses: School of Electrical and Data Engineering, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia ' School of Electrical and Data Engineering, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia

Abstract: Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network of a large number of battery-powered tiny sensor nodes wirelessly connected together to facilitate a wide range of monitoring applications. As WSN nodes are energy-constrained microelectronic devices, the primary design objective of WSNs is to minimise energy consumption to prolong the network lifetime. To achieve this goal, a range of cross-layer techniques, particularly focusing on medium access control (MAC) sublayer, is proposed targeting different WSN applications. This paper aims to survey low-power WSN MAC protocols, proposed from 2000 to the present, emphasising some general aspects including the issues addressed, the solutions proposed, design principles, strengths, drawbacks and target applications. With this aim, we mainly classify the MAC protocols into three categories: contention-based protocols, time division multiple access (TDMA)-based protocols and hybrid protocols, where the first category is further subdivided into subclasses. The development trends and potential research challenges are also discussed.

Keywords: WSN; wireless sensor network; MAC protocols; energy efficiency; network lifetime; QoS; quality of service; duty cycling; CSMA; carrier sense multiple access; TDMA; time division multiple access; hybrid.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2020.105563

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2020 Vol.32 No.3, pp.150 - 173

Received: 31 Oct 2019
Accepted: 31 Oct 2019
Published online: 03 Mar 2020 *

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