Medium Access Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

This chapter explores performance metrics for the evaluation of media access control (MAC) protocols are presented after discussing different MAC protocols’ performances. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consisting of a dense network with heavy communication have to handle traffic efficiently with low-power constraints. In general, MAC protocols are responsible for framing, medium access, reliability, flow control, and error control in the network. The latency and delay is a measure of the time taken by the MAC layer to send a packet from the sender node to the reception of a packet at the MAC layer. A general model for MAC protocol selection was proposed in WSNs, whereby the thumb rule of protocol selection was mathematically and analytically proved. Priority-based scheduling MAC protocols prioritize the links or the nodes, which are derived from a random function. Contention-based MAC protocols overcome the limitations of synchronization of nodes and overhead of control messages.