A Priority-Based Polling Scheme for Clustering Wireless Sensor Network MAC Protocols

In the paper, we propose a priority-based polling scheme for clustering wireless sensor networks MAC protocols. The sensor node with heavier communications burden is set up higher priority, and the sensor nodes with lighter communications burden are set up lower priority, and changing polling order represents two-levels priority differentiation. Under the control of the logic center, whenever serving one of the ordinary stations with exhaustive access policy is finished, the key station is permitted to be served with exhaustive access policy. Imbedded Markov chain theory was applied to analyze the priority-based polling scheme. Numerical and simulation experiments show the priority-based polling scheme for wireless sensor networks cannot only avoid collision, but also can apparently achieve better performance than the polling scheme without priority differentiation.