Towards a schedule based MAC protocol with QoS provisioning for sensor networks

Abstract

Some variants of wireless sensor networks, exemplified by medical sensor networks, can have applications where network traffic can almost entirely be comprised of centrally configurable uplink flows in a single piconet. With such paradigm in sight, we propose a framework for medium access control (MAC) protocols meant for exploiting the underlying centralized scheduling opportunity. A coordinator takes on the role of marshaling the wireless resources in its piconet; in a collision-free scheme, it schedules the time slots for each superframe based on the Quality-of-Service (QoS) specifications of nodes with additional provision for channel access for rare yet critical emergency data. In a preliminary study, we show the impact of some system parameters specific to this framework on delay incurred and energy absorbed in the network.