Priority and Traffic-Aware Contention-Based Medium Access Control Scheme for Multievent Wireless Sensor Networks

The requirement of high quality of service (QoS) in multi-priority industrial and domestic sensor networks poses new challenges to the increasing adoption of Internet of Things (IoT). In Multi-event Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs), nodes generate different types of data packets i.e., urgent (high priority) or normal (low priority), with different traffic proportions. High priority packets require an assurance of faster transmission and higher reliability in the network. In the literature, the existing medium access control (MAC) protocols for MWSNs have limited consideration in supporting data priority with different traffic proportions. Therefore, this paper proposes an energy efficient MAC scheme that incorporates multi-priority of data packets with dynamic traffic proportion, called PriTraCon-MAC. PriTraCon-MAC supports multi-events by considering four different priority levels of data packets and uses a novel approach that adjusts the contention window adaptively. Due to that, Request-To-Send frame of higher priority data can be sent earlier in the contention window, resulting in the corresponding faster acceptance by the receiver. Furthermore, mathematical delay analysis with different priority traffic proportions has also been undertaken. In addition, PriTraCon-MAC has been implemented in OMNET++ Castalia and its performance has been evaluated in terms of packet delay, reliability, and energy consumption, and compared with the existing Timeout Multi-priority based-MAC (TMPQ-MAC) under various network conditions. The simulation results demonstrate that PriTraCon-MAC offers lower average delay and achieves significantly higher packet success rate, while reducing energy consumption by up to 80% when compared with TMPQ-MAC protocol.