Collision reduction for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

This paper introduces an approach of media access control for reducing collisions in a heterogeneous wireless sensor network, which contains different types of sensor nodes so a sensor fusion technique can be barely applied. Data packets sent to a designated node can cause serious collision due to a funneling effect of network traffic. At lightly loaded networks, our approach uses traditional random media access, but it dynamically divides collision domains at heavy traffic to allow contending nodes fair opportunity to acquire the media. We have conducted extensive simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.