Advanced Sensor MAC protocol to support applications having different priority levels in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The initial deployment of wireless sensor networks focused more on applications which collected periodic information from places which are not easily accessible. As a result the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) focused more on minimizing per node energy consumption to extend the life span of sensor nodes. This lead to the design of sensor MAC protocols which treats both critical and non critical data generated by applications in the same way. The technical advancements in the development of new sensor nodes which consumes less energy and performs more tasks has opened up new fields of application for WSN. Looking forward there will be a need to support applications that generates data having different priority levels in WSN. This paper proposes a novel MAC protocol for WSN which can support applications, that senses critical random events, by transmitting these packets with higher priority. The simulation results shows that the proposed approach reduces the delay and packet loss by a huge margin when compared to existing Sensor MAC(S-MAC) framework. It achieves this reduction in delay and packet loss rate without compromising much on the per node energy consumption. This technique can be applied to any WSN that needs to cater applications that generate random high priority data.