Centralised against distributed medium access control scheduling for environmental monitoring sensors

The field of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), although started long back ago, has now reached its maximum usage in research and several kinds of monitoring and surveillance applications. Since the very small size and very low power working nature of the nodes, several challenges are faced by the entire network as a whole. Several scheduling and routing protocols were designed for the WSN. All of them are basically centralised or distributed in nature. For some of the well-known scheduling protocols, their behaviour under centralised and distributed manner is detailed here. It also specifies which type of schedule is suitable for which type of application and using either centralised or distributed approach. The scheduling algorithm which is best suitable for radiation monitoring application is described and also been proved that it is more energy efficient comparing to the existing protocols.