A STUDY ON SOME MAC PROTOCOLS

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are recently rapidly growing research in wireless communications. In WSNs, a large number of tiny sensor nodes are deployed
arbitrarily over the considered area to form a network. It has various range of application potentials in areas such as environmental monitoring, military surveillance, intruder detection, industrial process monitoring, target detection and tracking, and tactical systems. However, as they are spread in areas with difficult terrain and to achieve full coverage of area there are large number of wireless sensors used, but it is difficult to replace their batteries once exhausted.
Energy conservation is needed especially at MAC layer level. A large number of MAC protocols were proposed for wireless sensor networks. In this paper we first outline the sensor network properties which are required for the design of MAC layer protocols. Here we describe some MAC layer protocols with their advantages and disadvantages.