Rc-mac: Receiver Centric Medium Access Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Heavy traffic causes collision; there lies the challenge of providing the bias-free medium access opportunities to the sensor nodes. Hence, medium access protocol in event-driven WSN should be able to address two performance issues, energy efficiency of the system and the throughput. In this paper, we present a protocol, RC-MAC which integrates duty cycling and receiver-centric scheduling to provide high network throughput with efficient energy utilization in the system. To handle heavy traffic, nodes operate in a data gathering tree structure and supports multi-channel technique as in case of IEEE 802.15.4 RF transceivers. The receiver-centric medium access and distributed channel management technique contributes towards increasing overall throughput of the system and receiver helps in sender’s coordination with respect to medium access. We carried out our extensive simulation in NS-2.35 simulation environment and analyzed the performance of RC-MAC and as well compared the performance with asynchronous X-MAC. Along with energy efficiency and throughput, receiver-centric MAC achieves improved fairness among nodes in heavy-traffic load. Index Terms — Wireless sensor networks, Medium access, Duty-cycling, Receiver-centric scheduling, Multi-channel