An adaptive low power reservation based MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

A sensor network is a collection of wireless sensor nodes, each equipped with embedded processor, memory, and a wireless transceiver, that may be designed to perform distributed sensing and tracking operations. The sensor nodes use ad hoc networking principles to communicate amongst themselves. However, limitations of battery power in the sensor nodes and the bursty and correlated nature of traffic in the network introduce additional constraints for designing the communication protocols for sensor networks over that of traditional ad hoc networks. This paper proposes a reservation based medium access control (MAC) protocol for sensor networks that provides a high probability of success in packet transmissions, low average energy consumption, and adaptability to the traffic requirements to maximize the data throughput.