A practical design of multi-channel MAC for cluster-tree WSN

Multi-channel media access control (MAC) now has been well understood in wireless sensor network (WSN) with the development of sensor device which is equipped with a single half-duplex transceiver with multiple-frequency support. However, peer-to-peer WSN causes much attention by researchers, while it is not suitable for lots of practical applications. In this paper, a new design of multi-channel MAC special for cluster-tree WSN, a typical asymmetric network, is introduced. Cluster-tree WSN has many special features in nodes distribution and data direction. According to these features, phase hopping (control channel and data channel coexist) is used to achieve multi-channel assignment and channel switch and time division multiple address (TDMA) mechanism is utilized to avoid data collision in the period of nodes´ communication. The simulation results show that the scheme presented has advantages in providing higher maximum effective data transmission and smaller average packet delay and reducing energy consumption.