Autonomous Collision-Free Scheduling in Low-Power Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) provide a cost-effective, scalable, and adaptable alternative to wired deployments, making them ideal for smart infrastructure applications. However, challenges related to Quality of Service (QoS) and reliability hinder their adoption in safety-critical use cases or industrial automation. Medium Access Control (MAC) optimisation plays a crucial role in addressing these limitations. This paper introduces the Autonomous Collision-free Protocol (ACP), a MAC scheduling mechanism designed to reduce contention and support high network throughput while ensuring energy efficiency. ACP achieves this through linear probing-based collision resolution, hashing-based autonomous scheduling enabling multi-slot allocation, and a MAC schedule cell deactivation mechanism. Simulation results indicate that ACP successfully addresses network contention, eliminating packet collisions due to schedule conflicts, and significantly improves throughput compared to existing protocols.