Contention Window MAC parameters tyning for wireless multimedia Sensor Networks

Abstract

The strong constraint of the traffic performance (Delay, Throughput, etc.) of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSN) is a great challenge to satisfy. For this reason, an enhanced version of the access method IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) with the duty cycling mechanism has been used in the MAC layer of the WMSN. The EDCA maintains four Access Categories (AC) representing four levels of priority. The priority of each AC is maintained by a set of MAC parameters. In this paper, we will study the influence of the MAC parameters Contention Window CWmin and CWmax of the EDCA on the energy consumption and the traffic performance of the WMSN. The simulation results show the clear existence of influence. In addition, we noticed that the dynamic adaptation of these two parameters will enable efficient adaptation and use of the EDCA in the WMSN in terms of energy consumption and traffic performance.