The Design And Implementation Of Multi-Channel MAC Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks

The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which is made up of a large number of sensor nodes, is a data-centric and self-organized distributed network. It is widely used in environmental monitoring, industrial automation, agricultural, medical and many other commercial applications. With the continued promotion and development of Internet of Things, as a core technology, the applications of WSNs trend to be diversified and in large-scale. The coexistence phenomenon makes a variety of wireless sensor networks share limited frequency channel resources, which results link interferences influence in network performance from different degree, such as packet lose rate, transmission latency and so on Recently, many researches on the network coexistence illustrates avoiding link interferences is the key topic.MAC protocols determine the usage of wireless channels, and play a key role in the WSNs. With the diversification and scale, the traditional single-channel MAC protocols as well as the competition-based MAC protocols all cannot meet the requirements of high throughput, high reliability, low latency and power consumption demands of these applications. Importing the mechanisms of multi-channel and non-competition is one of the effective ways to solve above problems.Multi-channel MAC protocols take use of characteristics of multi-channel resources, and make different sensor nodes can communicate with each other at the same time using different channels. This effectively improves the transmission rate, reduces the chances of collisions and interferences, increases the throughput and reduces the network latency. In this paper, we design and implement a multi-channel MAC Protocol based on IEEE802.15.4. The protocol contains a variety of mechanisms and rationally uses the available channel resource, making neighbor sensor nodes try to avoid using same channels. This protocol reduces the interferences, thereby, decreasing packet lose, improving network performance and meeting different application requirements.There are three contributions in this paper. First, the paper overviews the relative works and current development situations of WSNs, analyzes the problem of single-channel MAC protocols, expounds the benefits of multi-channel MAC protocols. Second, we design and implement an IEEE802.15.4-based multi-channel MAC Protocol, named High Anti-Interference MAC (HAMAC) to solve the problem in single-channel MAC protocol. Finally, we build a test environment to compare the performance of IEEE802.15.4and HAIMAC.