Adaptive MAC protocols for forest fire detection using Wireless Sensor Networks

Power consumption, latency, and complexity are considered to be a benchmark for comparing Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). However, the importance of these elements varies according to the application. In this paper, three MAC protocols are proposed for forest fire detection. Basically, two of these protocols are based on the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol with some modification to suit the forest fire detection application. These protocols are called Persistent CSMA (P-CSMA) and Per Hope Synchronization CSMA (PHS-CSMA). The third one is a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA)-based protocol, called Sensor TDMA (S-TDMA). These three protocols are investigated and analyzed by simulation. Results show that there is no superior protocol which outperforms others in terms of power consumption, delay and complexity. However, a trade-off does exist. In terms of power consumption, S-TDMA outperforms other protocols but it has the worst performance in terms of delay. On the other hand, considering the design complexity, S-TDMA is the most complex as it needs time synchronization over the entire cluster while PCSMA and PHS-CSMA don´t require time synchronization between nodes.