Comparative Study of Various Mac Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

The wireless sensor network (WSN) was primarily developed as a military application to survey a battlefield. However, now a WSN is commonly used in many other industrial and commercial applications to monitor environmental conditions, health care applications and traffic controls. There are many different kinds of wireless sensor networks, however; they all normally come equipped with a radio transceiver or a wireless communication device or a power source. In this paper, we describe several MAC protocols proposed for sensor networks emphasizing their strengths and weaknesses.