Design and Implementation of Medium Access Control Protocol for Magneto-Inductive Wireless Sensor Networks Using Low Power Sensor Nodes

Magneto-inductive (MI) wireless sensor networks (MIWSNs) are rapidly emerging networks that offer a wide variety of applications due to their similar performance in air, underground, and underwater mediums. With the increasing demand of using MIWSNs for different applications, the need for an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol to better utilize the available channels also increases. This article thus realizes the need for a MAC protocol for MIWSNs and presents the design and implementation of a simple and an energy-efficient MI-MAC protocol. This article first presents the design decisions and the proposed algorithm of the MI-MAC protocol. It then discusses the implementation of the MI-MAC protocol for the two possible (sequential and simultaneous) transmit configurations available with a 3-D MI transceiver. MI-MAC implementation for both sequential and simultaneous transmit configurations are evaluated for energy consumption and throughput performance. The results show that the sequential configuration outperforms the simultaneous configuration in energy efficiency by three times, whereas simultaneous configuration outperforms the sequential configuration in terms of throughput by three times. This article, therefore, presents MI-MAC implementation for a hybrid configuration to achieve optimal performance in terms of both energy efficiency and throughput.