A Prioritized MAC Protocol for Multihop, Event-driven Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a new prioritized medium access control protocol (PSIFT) that improves the performance of event-driven wireless sensor networks by suppressing the redundant reports of sensor nodes in proximity. This suppression of similar reports results in low collision probability, shorter delay and accurate detection of events by the sink. PSIFT is a CSMA-based MAC protocol that provides traffic differentiation by varying the inter frame space and contention window size for each traffic class. We also introduce the new report suppression mechanism based on the broadcast nature of wireless transmission in PSIFT. This mechanism works very efficiently in large-scale, event-driven wireless sensor networks. Simulation results show that the new PSIFT MAC protocol can bring significant improvement in delay performance of the networks. When the sensing range grows up to transmission range, PSIFT can reduce the latency as much as three times in delivering reports as compared to the existing IEEE802.11 MAC protocol.