High QoS and energy efficient medium access control protocols for wireless sensor networks

Development of Wireless Sensor Nodes revolutionaries sensing and control application. The size of sensor node makes it ideal to be used in variety of applications, but this brings more challenges and problems especially as the capacity of onboard battery is limited. It is due to the very reason that initial research in the field of WSN especially on MAC targets mainly on the energy conservation and gives secondary importance towards other attributes of MAC protocols. These attributes includes latency, throughput, fairness and collision. This research keeping in view of current application requirements which demands QoS as well as energy conservation in static and mobile sensor networks proposes MAC protocols to meet these challenges. In this research to improve the efficiency of the collision resolution algorithms used in mainly contention based MAC protocols, an Improved Binary Exponential Backoff Algorithm is proposed. The main target of this protocol is to resolve the problem of access collision by employing interim backoff period. The protocol targets to improve upon the performance of conventional Binary Exponential Backoff Algorithm which suffers heavily from collision. The result shows significant reduction in collision which increases the efficiency of the network in terms of QoS and energy conservation. To eliminate the problem of collision which is one of the major sources of network performance degradation a novel Delay Controlled Collision Free contention based MAC is designed. The protocol uses novel delay allocation technique. DCCF also provides mechanism to achieve fairness among the nodes. Detailed analysis and comparative result shows substantial increase in throughput and decrease in latency as compared to Industrial standard of IEEE 802.15.4 CSMA/CA MAC. The research also proposed novel MAC protocols for mobile sensor networks. These protocols uses a methodology which is based upon signal strength of the beacon sent to the node from various neighbouring coordinators that enable the nodes to seamlessly enter from one cluster to another without any link loss and unnecessary delays in the shape of association. The proposed scheme is implemented over IEEE 802.15.4 enabling the standard to perform better with dynamic topology. Result shows that mobility adaptive 802.15.4 protocol shows improvement in QoS and conserve energy far better than the existing conventional CSMA/CA MAC standard. Also the algorithm is implemented over Delay Controlled Collision Free Mac protocol and a detail comparison is carried out with other mobility adaptive MAC protocols. The result shows significant decrease in latency as well as high gain in throughput and considerable reduction in energy as compared to the mobility adaptive MAC protocols. Finally in order to resolve fundamental problem of scalable network which suffers from bottleneck as more nodes in the last hop tries to send data towards the sink, a novel protocol is proposed which allows more than one node at a time to transmit the data towards the sink. The protocol named Simultaneous Multi node CSMA/CA enables the conventional industrial standard of IEEE 802.15.4 CSMA/CA protocol to allow more than one node to transmit the data towards the coordinator or sink node. The protocol out performs the existing standard and provides significant increase in QoS of the network.