This chapter addresses the topic of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols
in WSNs. A MAC protocol has the important role to control access to a
shared communication medium. The specific characteristics of WSNs trigger
the main requirements of a MAC protocol running in such an environment.
A careful design of the MAC protocol is required for an optimal performance
and increased lifetime of the network. Thus, it becomes critical to design MAC
protocols that are energy-e?±cient, distributed, and scalable. Depending on the
application, additional parameters such as latency might be required as well.
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ceeds a certain threshold. In contrast, ad hoc networks are address-centric,
Ali Abu-el Humos et al.
Chapter 4 Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks
This chapter describes the main characteristics of MAC protocols in WSNs
and surveys MAC protocols recently proposed in the literature.
The rest of this chapter is structured as follows. In Section 2 we present
the requirements, classification and main design challenges of a MAC protocol
in WSNs. We continue with a description of the representative MAC protocols.
We classify them as scheduled-based protocols and contention-based
protocols, depending on the mechanism used to dictate the access to the communication
medium. Section 3 presents scheduled-based MAC protocols and
Section 4 describes representative contention-based MAC protocols.
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