Receiver based interference protection for MAC protocol in WSNs

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the advantages of receiver based interference protection for Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and to present a two-hop protection scheme which can increase the probability of successful data packet transmission. In previous studies of MAC protocols for WSNs, hop based interference models are commonly used, and the MAC protection schemes are designed according to this model to schedule conflict free transmission. MAC protection is typically implemented from the transmitter´s perspective as a natural choice when forming the schedules. However, this type of protection scheme significantly underestimates real interference levels which are distance based, and channel capacity is wasted due to unnecessary protection. In the modified APRMAC protocol, the interference protection is built around the receiver´s perspective, and the range of protection is also extended. The performance is evaluated in terms of the probability of successful packet transmission with a full interference model, and compared with the TRAMA and original APRMAC protocols. Results show that it can outperform both in terms of capacity and packet loss.