Impact of receiver sensitivity on the performance of sensor networks

Medium access control (MAC) protocols significantly affect the performance of sensor networks. Little attention, however, has been devoted to the impact of physical layer characteristics on the MAC layer. One of the most important physical layer parameters is the receiver sensitivity. In this paper, we study the impact of receiver sensitivity on the network performance using a recently developed communication-theoretic framework for the analysis of multi-hop ad hoc wireless networks. In particular, we consider a reservation-based MAC protocol scheme, defined as reserve-listen-and-go (RESLIGO) without retransmission, suitable for circuit-switched sensor networks with limited receiver sensitivity. It will be shown that, in order to maximize the transfer of information in the network, the optimal receiver sensitivity depends on the traffic load.