Performance analysis of synchronous and receiver initiated MAC protocols under varying traffic density over Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are of great interest to researchers due to their various applications in areas such as environmental monitoring, process monitoring and tracking surveillance systems. Sensors are deployed in hostile in random fashion giving self-organized topology. Medium Access Control (MAC) plays a vital role in the power saving mechanism of WSNs. MAC schemes for WSNs are different from traditional wireless MAC scheme such as IEEE802.11. This paper provides comprehensive performance analysis of the existing synchronous and asynchronous MAC layer protocols. The widely used synchronous and asynchronous mechanisms in WSNs are SMAC and Receiver Initiated MAC (RI-MAC). The paper presents a comparison of the performance of SMAC and RI-MAC on flat grid topology with a single sensor node as the sink. Here multi-hop transmissions are considered and various performance metric factors such as throughput, energy and latency are evaluated. Ns2 simulation result shows that RI-MAC has better performance than SMAC upon taking various performance metric factors in WSNs.