Performance Analysis of MAC Schemes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have become an important area of research in recent years. A sensor network can be a network infrastructure consisting of elements that are nothing but some sensing devices which perform communication and computation along with the sensing of real world phenomenon. The data collected by these elements are sent to an administrator located at a base station who can react to specific situations by analyzing the data. Thus data collection is an important activity performed by a sensor network. To facilitate the smooth and faster collection of data, various channel access schemes are available in literature. Among these schemes TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access), CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) and FDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access) are the most basic as well as the most important ones. This paper analyzes the performance of these schemes in wireless sensor networks by considering a data collection scenario with a set of performance metrics. The TDMA scheme has been implemented using an adaptive timeslot assignment mechanism. The experimentations are conducted in TinyOS platform using Crossbow TelosB motes. The performance done in this paper will be helpful in choosing an optimal protocol based on these schemes for deployment of a network as well as for developing a new medium access protocol,