Performance study of a preamble based MAC protocol in multi-hop wireless networks

The majority of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols that are designed for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) solely rely on the carrier-sense capabilities of the transceiver. Typical low-power transceivers require a large amount of time to detect a busy channel and to switch from receive mode to transmit mode. Moreover, the switching phase represents a vulnerable period for random access MAC protocols since the transceivers are not able to sense the medium during the switching phase. These issues can be addressed by MAC protocols which make use of preamble transmissions to schedule the access to the medium. However, the transmission of preambles induces additional protocol overhead which might be a performance limiting factor in multi-hop networks. In this paper a preamble based MAC protocol in combination with a directed diffusion based routing protocol is simulated and compared with the performance of Zigbee in multi-hop wireless networks.