A control channel based MAC protocol for time critical and emergency communications in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

For time critical applications in industrial environments, failure in communication or unwanted delay can have devastating effects. It is therefore, important that Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) offer reliable communication platform for time critical applications without violating the hard deadlines. In this paper, a MAC protocol for time critical and emergency communications is proposed. The proposed protocol, EE-MAC incorporates emergency communication and allows immediate channel access for such data. The paper presents mathematical model of the proposed protocol. For evaluation purposes, the performance of EE-MAC is compared to IEEE 802.15.4e LLDN. The results show that the proposed protocol offers up to 92% reduction in channel access delay of emergency communication at the cost of 5% to 15% increase in delay of non-critical and less time-sensitive data.