MAC Performances for Localization and Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks

Time delay rather then throughput, is a constraint of greater importance in tracking systems. In particular, the maximum accces delay permissible by the application ins strongly related to the dynamics of theracked objects. The purpose of this article is to study the performance of a new media access control (MAC) technology specifically suited for LDR UWB systems [3] under the point of view of a tracking application. Specifically, the time delay necessary to collect the ranging information in both, star and meshed topology networks, have been studied as function of the number of mobiles in the network. More importantly, we propose two new ranging packet to be used inside the aforementioned MAC, in order to achieve in both the network topologies, a clear advantage compared to the current solution.