Performance of a multi-channel MAC protocol based on IEEE 802.15.4 radio

This paper presents an implementation based study of multi-channel medium access control protocols in hardware constrained wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes with 802.15.4 radio. In the network architecture presented, each sensor node has a single radio transceiver that can be tuned to any of the available sixteen non-overlapping channels. The simplest way to select data channel is to use a common channel signaling between the nodes. We have conducted experiments to verify whether control channel congestion can occur in case of 802.15.4 radios using MicaZ and TelosB motes. The throughput results show the per-node throughput does not decline as significantly with increasing number of senders, with the proposed multi-channel protocol.