Intra-cluster Contention Resolution in Wireless Sensor Networks

Contention resolution plays an important role in designing medium access control protocols. Owing to technical constraints of wireless sensor networks, the task of efficiently resolving contention poses severeal challenges. In clustered wireless sensor networks, many-to-one communication is the dominant pattern, which is also applicable to the star topology. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art contention-resolution techniques designed for this communication pattern with a discussion of their features and limitations. We closely examine several contentionresolution schemes, including our recently proposed BSTCR algorithm, with performance evaluation in multiple aspects.