A Study on MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Medium Access Control (MAC) is an important technique that ensures the successful operation of WSN because it controls the radio's activity of sensor nodes, which consumes node's major energy. MAC protocols must be energy efficient in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we study MAC protocols for WSNs, including schedule-based protocols such as TDMA and contention-based protocols such as S-MAC. Then we make comparisons with some typical MAC protocols to show the impaction on network performance under different scenarios.