Mobile Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

This chapter aims to develop techniques to improve and enhance the quality of service of Medium Access Control (MAC) for the existing wireless industrial standard Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 802.15.4 in mobile application. Mobility in Wireless Sensor Networks raises new challenges and problems that occur at MAC level due to the existing link failure and new link formation. The mobile nodes may experience loss of connectivity in a network using schedule-based protocols. The main drawback of using such protocols is that they rely on allocating random backoff delays to resolve the collisions, but as the number of nodes increases, the probability of nodes selecting the same backoff increases, thus resulting in access collision. Setup time can also be referred to as response time. The response time is defined as the time required by any node in the network when the packet arrives in its buffer to the time the node about to transmit the packet.