A new MAC solution for multi-channel single radio in wireless sensor networks

Wireless communication has become the fastest growing area in the communication industry. The demand for using this medium ranges from security, military, Internet and scientific purposes and are rapidly replacing wire-line systems in many developing countries. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is currently a research area that is being studied by many researchers and industries within the wireless communication arena. It is not only being considered for use for target detection, environmental monitoring and tactical systems, but is also a promising technology for use in multimedia systems such as streaming video and surveillance. The use of multichannel assignment can substantially improve the performance of WSNs using the IEEE specifications of non-overlapping channels simultaneously. The 802.11 multichannel Medium Access Control (MAC) schemes do not efficiently utilize this technology owing to the overhead caused by channel assignments. In this paper a new approach is used by applying multichannel to reduce the waiting time of a node when attempting to access a busy medium. The back-off algorithm will switch channel when the contention window of the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) has reach an assigned threshold. The sink node will perform interface switching to receive data from channels coming from source nodes.