A High Throughput MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks in Surveillance Applications

Monitoring a given environment is a kind of major applications in wireless sensor networks. These WSNs should often meet special requirements, such as high throughput support, service differentiation support and energy efficiency. However, related works always emphasis on one or two of them, and hardly consider comprehensively. In this paper, we propose a new-style MAC protocol, which based on the above-mentioned factors. Cluster-based multihop scheduling and priority-aware schedule switching are crucial technologies in the MAC protocol. Moreover, idle listening energy consumption is reduced by using a synchronized duty cycle. Experiments show that the proposed strategy achieves our goals. The energy consumption of the radio module is reduced while high throughput is provided.