An Energy-efficient Receiver Oriented Hybrid Multi-channel MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

We can find the applications of wireless sensor networks in many fields such as target detection and tracking, environmental monitoring, industrial process monitoring etc. The density of nodes in wireless sensor network increases along with the usage. This places a new challenge for Medium Access Control protocol design. The nodes in wireless sensor networks are battery operated. So, they have a limited power source. To increase the lifetime of the network, available energy should be used efficiently. In communication, we can save energy at different layers of the network model. At Medium Access Control (MAC) layer, we can save considerable energy if the radio is used in an effective way. Although, A Traditional MAC protocols consume less power by using a single channel but performance is limited. A Number of multi-channel MAC protocols for WSNs have been proposed. These protocols can perform better than single channel MAC protocols only if the load is less. They are not energy efficient if the load is high. This paper proposes a receiver oriented timeslot sharing multichannel medium access protocol for wireless sensor networks. The objective is to achieve maximum performance & energy efficiency under both light & heavy traffic conditions. The proposed scheme allows multiple sensor nodes to transmit the data in parallel using multiple channels. The results of simulation show that the proposed protocol achieves maximum performance under both light and heavy traffic conditions and also energy efficient.