On the Effects of Interference between Heterogeneous Sensor Network MAC Protocols

The growing popularity of sensor networks has resulted in the creation of various MAC protocols, each optimized for a different set of application requirements. However, all of these heterogeneous MAC protocols are designed under the assumption that all nodes in the wireless environment use a common MAC protocol. When multiple sensor networks are deployed in the same wireless environment, this assumption no longer holds since different sensor networks will most likely make use of different MAC protocols. This paper investigates the effect of interference between sensor networks using heterogeneous MAC protocols, based on the network performance of these sensor networks. The network performance of TDMA, CSMA/CA, T-MAC and LPL-MAC, a variant of B-MAC, is examined. Test results show that depending on the interfering MAC protocol, the amount of interference and the load of the network, the average energy consumption can increase by 17% for contention-based protocols and 62% for TDMA based protocols. Moreover this interference can cause the end-to-end data loss to more than double for contention-based protocols while for TDMA protocols the end-to-end data loss can increase from 0.1% to more than 40%.