A Dynamic Multi-radio Multi-channel MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

For improving throughput and energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks, multi-channel media access control has been proposed. Existing multi-channel MAC protocols are mainly focus on channel assignment and media access, it means that a senor node is bound with one channel, which makes the whole network inflexible and cannot be adapted to the variations of environment. In this paper, we proposed a Dynamic Multi-radio Multi-channel media Access control (DMMA) for wireless sensor networks, it can chose the channel dynamically according to the changing of spectrum environment, and make the network more robust to the interferences from external surroundings, meanwhile, take into account the energy efficiency, DMMA use a sleeping-based mechanism to reduce energy consumption. We also invent an ARM9 based four radios wireless sensor node to evaluate our solution on a real sensor network. Through our experiments, DMMA can avoid the impact of interference effectively, and also it achieves good fairness for multiple channel access.