An intelligent hybrid MAC with traffic-differentiation-based QoS for wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we present the Intelligent Hybrid MAC (IH-MAC), a novel low power with quality of service guaranteed medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The IH-MAC achieves high energy efficiency under wide range of traffic load. It ensures shorter latency to critical and delay-sensitive packets. The IH-MAC protocol achieves high channel utilization during high traffic load without compromising energy efficiency. The IH-MAC does it by using the strength of CSMA and TDMA approach with intelligence. The novel idea behind the IH-MAC is that it uses both the broadcast scheduling and link scheduling. Depending on the network loads, the IH-MAC protocol dynamically switches from broadcast scheduling to link scheduling and vice versa in order to achieve better efficiency. The scheduling is done in the IH-MAC with a novel decentralized approach where the nodes locally use the clock arithmetic to find the time slot, allocated for it. Furthermore, the IH-MAC uses Request-To-Send, Clear-To-send handshakes with methods for adapting the transmit power to the minimum level necessary to reach the intended neighbor. Thus, the IH-MAC reduces energy consumption by suitably varying the transmit power. The IH-MAC also uses the concept of parallel transmission that further reduces delay. The analytical and simulation results corroborate the theoretical idea, and show the efficiency of our proposed protocol.