Adaptive Mac protocols for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Recent advancements in wireless communications and sensor technologies have enabled the development of low-cost sensor networks for diverse applications, such as intelligent battlefields, earthquake response systems, military objects tracking, reconnaissance surveillance, hazardous environment exploration monitoring, industry monitoring, and smart hospitals, etc. Different applications have their own characteristics and different requirements for the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A set of performance metrics, including energy-efficiency, self-organization ability, scalability, robustness, latency, throughput, fairness, etc., are not only used to measure the performance of protocols, but also the applicability of a wireless sensor network to a certain application. Adaptability and application-awareness of a wireless sensor network directly determines the applicability of a wireless sensor network. Due to the diversity of applications, the adaptability and application-awareness of a wireless sensor network are still open research issues.

Medium access control (MAC) layer protocols play a critical role in fulfilling the performance metrics of wireless sensor networks. In this dissertation, we propose to fulfill the adaptability and application-awareness of wireless sensor networks with energy-efficient adaptive MAC protocols as well as effective characterization and modelling of the application-specific requirements. Such characterization and modelling can be rendered to the adaptive MAC protocols, so that the wireless sensor networks enabled with the adaptive MAC protocols are able to be adaptable to application-specific requirements.