A Combined Approach for Receiver-Based MAC and Network Layers in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data communication represents the greatest energy cost of wireless sensor networks. Both MAC and network layers of the protocol stack are responsible for data communication in these networks. This work proposes the Receiver- based Medium Access Control (Rb-MAC) protocol to be used in a combined solution with a receiver-based routing scheme. The main advantage of combining receiver-based MAC and routing protocols is that this solution does not use neighbor tables and, consequently, it saves energy when compared with MAC and routing protocols that use these tables. Simulation results reveal that receiver-based data communication has a great data delivery ratio, and reduces energy consumption, number of transmissions, and collisions when compared with a sender-based data communication. Moreover, we use a model checking technique to perform the formal verification of Rb-MAC.