A Survey on Medium Access Control (MAC) for Clustering Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has gained enormous popularity since it is a base of an Internet of Things and applied in many areas of application. However, this network suffers an energy constraint issue which has to be tackled. Medium Access Control (MAC) manages the radio communication of transmitter and receiver, which is the highest energy consumed of sensor nodes. Therefore, many researchers have been proposed new MAC protocols to overcome this limitation. This paper explores and compares several MAC protocols for clustering WSN. Clustering network has a different characteristic since it classifies nodes as Cluster Heads and Cluster Members. This leads to a unique approach in developing MAC to enhance the network's performance.

Wireless Geophone Networks for Land Seismic Data Acquisition: A Survey, Tutorial and Performance Evaluation

“…The medium access control (MAC) sublayer of the link layer is responsible for coordinating how nodes or geophones access the shared wireless medium for data transmission and reception. An effective MAC scheme will provide the best network performance by ensuring fair access to the shared radio channel (medium) and ensuring minimal collision of packets, subsequently leading to increased network throughput, low latency as well as low energy consumption [33]. In wireless sensor networks (WSN), the topology of the network plays a vital role in choosing which MAC scheme to implement.…”

“…Cluster heads serve as a coordinator and control how cluster members access the shared wireless medium. Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA), a random access scheme based on the exponential back-off algorithm is often employed in flat-based topologies as the fundamental algorithm to access the medium since no coordinator is employed [33]. In random access schemes, nodes asynchronously contend for channel access whenever they have packets to be sent.…”

“…Although random access or contention-based approach provides good scalability in WSNs, some of its major drawbacks include collision, idle listening, overhearing and control packet overhead [35]. On the other hand, most cluster-based networks employ Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) or schedule-based MAC schemes in accessing the medium [33]. In such schemes, nodes access the channel in an orderly manner.…”