Energy efficient medium access control protocols for wireless sensor networks – A survey

Abstract

The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are not centralized and doesn’t have a proper infrastructure that enables it to be the dominant networking solution for major communication demands. Though, a number of efforts have been made to augment WSN routing protocols, however ever-increasing complexity including topological variations, resource constrained environment, event-driven deadline sensitive communication demands alarm for better routing scheme. Amongst major potential solutions optimizing Medium Access Control (MAC) of the standard IEEE 802.15.4 which is default protocol stack of WSN has always been the dominant solution. However, to cope-up with above stated demands augmenting MAC protocol has always been an open and broadened horizon for researchers. With this motivation, in this paper, surveys of numerous recently developed state-of-arts MAC protocols have been presented. In addition to this, different MAC protocols with respective strengths as well as weaknesses have been presented.