A Self-Organizing Multi-Channel Medium Access Control (SMMAC) Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes a novel multi-channel medium access control (MAC) protocol designed for wireless sensor networks (WSN). Although multiple channel radio communication protocols are well understood in ad hoc wireless and other radio networks, most are not applicable in WSN as sensor nodes which are constrained by low cost and a primitive physical layer. The proposed MAC allows data transmissions take place on multiple channels simultaneously within a single or multiple overlapped radio zones. This MAC applies a light weight, two- tier handshaking algorithm permitting sensor nodes to negotiate a non-occupied channel dynamically. Experimental results show that SMMAC can improve the network performance compared with traditional single channel MAC.