A Survey on Real-Time MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

As wireless sensor network becomes pervasive, new requirements have been continuously emerged. However, the most of research efforts in wireless sensor network are focused on energy problem since the nodes are usually battery-powered. Among these requirements, real-time communication is one of the big research challenges in wireless sensor networks because most of query messages carry time information. To meet this requirement, recently several real-time medium access control protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks in the literature because waiting time to share medium on each node is one of main source for end-to-end delay. In this paper, we first introduce the specific requirement of wireless sensor real-time MAC protocol. Then, a collection of recent wireless sensor real-time MAC protocols are surveyed, classified, and described emphasizing their advantages and disadvantages whenever possible. Finally we present a discussion about the challenges of current wireless sensor real-time MAC protocols in the literature, and show the conclusion in the end.