A medium access control protocol for a wireless network with diverse numbers of transceivers [sensor network]

This paper proposes a MAC protocol that allows fair access between heterogeneous nodes with diverse numbers of transceivers. For each arrived packet, the proposed protocol needs to decide which transceiver to use such that connectivity and fairness requirements can be met. The transceiver selection is based on a probabilistic scheme where the probabilities are computed off-line according to the load distribution (LD) on all channels. Through approximate analysis of the LD scheme, the unfairness is found proportional to the number of nodes in the network but inversely proportional to the maximum number of transceivers supported. To further reduce the unfairness, an improvement has been made to the basic LD scheme. Simulation results indicate that the fairness achieved by the improved scheme is never worse compared to the basic scheme without compromising the connectivity requirements. In short, the proposed MAC protocol has allowed heterogeneous wireless sensors with diverse members of transceivers to co-exist and communicate fairly.