A Traffic Queue-aware MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have been widely used in many important areas. Medium access control (MAC) protocols take charge of the distribution and administration of sensor network´s wireless channel, and have a significant influence on the function and performance of sensor networks. Most traditional MAC protocols do not consider traffic loads directly, but the amount of traffic affects the efficiency of channel assignment and energy utilization. This paper summarizes existing wireless sensor network MAC protocols, and proposes a novel traffic queue-aware sensor MAC protocol (QSMAC) which is based on sensor MAC (SMAC) protocol and can predict the amount of data traffic in network with the average increase rate of data packets in a node´s buffer queue. The simulation indicates that the performance of our protocol is much better than that of SMAC protocol in data packet´s delay, the consumption of energy, the reception ratio of data packets and the throughput of the network.