Medium Access Control With Sleeping For Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, Wireless Sensor Network technology emerges with the great development of wireless communication technology. Wireless Sensor Network technology, which integrates sensor technology, embedded computing technology, modern network technology, wireless communication technology, and distributed information processing technology together, realizes a completely new method of information collecting and processing. It is considered as one of the most important technologies in 21st century, which will bring great influence on mankind's mode of life in the future.In Wireless Sensor Network, the power of each sensor node is limited, Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is needed to keep efficient using of the power, so that MAC protocols of Wireless Sensor Network become a very active research area. Introducing various sleeping algorithms into contention-based wireless network MAC protocol is an important method of saving power.In this paper, firstly the general concept, the systematical structure and the unique features of Wireless Sensor Network are expatiated, the restrictive factors and the main capability index of Wireless Sensor Network are analyzed, and the notions and principles of Wireless Sensor Network and MAC protocols are explained. On the basis of these general notions and principles, the MAC protocols of Wireless Sensor Network which base on sleeping/listening schedule are analyzed, and the most basic S-MAC protocol in this class of protocols is drew great effort in. Furthermore, various improved protocols on the basis of S-MAC protocol are briefly analyzed, and the advantages, disadvantages and applicable scenarios of them are pointed out respectively. S-MAC protocol and its improved protocols can generally meet the requirements for Wireless Sensor Network, but when the traffic load in network is light, the performance in saving power of these protocols need to be improved further. To this scenario, another class of MAC protocols which base on low power channel listening technology are analyzed, emphasizing on the fundamental WiseMAC protocol and briefly analyzing SCP-MAC protocol, one of its improved protocols.By simulation, the paper validates the MAC protocols with sleeping in power...