A multi-channel MAC protocol with high throughput for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), sensor nodes are hardly recharged, so energy efficiency is always considered to be of primary importance. However, recent applications, such as health monitoring applications, require high throughput to transmit sensing data in a burst. Aiming to maximize the integral throughput, we propose a new scheduled multi-channel MAC protocol, named LS-MAC, which adopts a fully distributed scheduling scheme through locally selecting and updating the time slot/channel pair information. Each node is assigned a time slot to transmit on a particular channel, making LS-MAC run efficiently without collisions under high-load traffic scenarios. Extensive simulation results on Glomosim platform show that LS-MAC exhibits higher bandwidth utilization and integral throughput without sacrificing energy efficiency. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.