A light-weight channel rendezvous scheduling for multi-channel medium access in sensor networks

In this paper, we present an efficient channel rendezvous (i.e., sender and receiver communicate on the same channel) scheduling for multi-channel medium access control (MAC) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The proposed scheme mainly targets to implement an efficient medium access control that can cope-up and adapt with the mostly available dynamic and diverse traffic environments of WSNs. To do so, the duty-cycle (periodic wake-up and sleep under low traffic) and multi-channel (at heavy traffic) concepts are applied for the proposed channel rendezvous and medium access design. Unlike earlier works the given approach is asynchronously scheduled and avoids the time-synchronization overhead in maintaining the node´s cycles for channel rendezvous as well as the time-slotted medium access in data communication. Finally, the protocol is evaluated through extensive simulations and we have observed the efficiency of the proposed work over few existing schemes.