0 Study of Various MAC Protocols For WSN

Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Network and Computer Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jnca
Review
A meticulous study of various medium access control protocols

for wireless sensor networks
Ratnadip Adhikari
School of Computer and Systems sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 110067, India
art ic l e i nf o
a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received 25 February 2013
Received in revised form
22 November 2013
Accepted 27 January 2014
During the last decade, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have evolved as an incredibly useful
technology in the area of signal processing and data communication. They have found prolic
applications in a wide range of domains which include cell phone monitoring, robotic exploration,
disaster management, intrusion detection and medical systems. Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols
constitute an important set of regulations which enables the successful and smooth operation of the
WSN. A fundamental design goal of all MAC protocols is to prevent energy wastes from various possible
sources during data communications. Till now, a wide variety of MAC protocols with different objectives
have been accumulated in sensor network literature. A thorough study of these protocols is very
important both from the perspectives of understanding the current research trends and determining
scopes for further innovative works in this domain. This paper meticulously discusses about the
associated issues and difculties which are faced in designing efcient MAC protocols for WSNs. Several
popular MAC protocols are described here with their inherent merits and demerits. In order to provide
an up-to-date survey, various MAC protocols which have been developed relatively recently are
discussed, together with the traditional benchmark ones. Finally, this paper concludes with outlining a
number of innovative ideas and future research directions in this domain.
& 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Data communication
Wireless sensor networks
MAC protocols
Distributed nodes
Energy waste
Collision avoidance
Overhearing
Contents
1.
2.
3.
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Design and implementation issues of MAC protocols for WSN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1.
Primary reasons of energy waste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2.
Properties of a good MAC protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Various developed MAC protocols for WSN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3.1.
MACA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.2.
MACAW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.3.
IEEE 802.11. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.4.
Power aware multi-access signaling (PAMAS) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.5.
Sensor MAC (S-MAC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.5.1.
An empirical demonstration of energy saving vs. increased latency. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.5.2.
Advantages of S-MAC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.5.3.
Disadvantages of S-MAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.6.
Timeout MAC (T-MAC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.6.1.
Clustering and synchronization in T-MAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.6.2.
RTS operation in T-MAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.6.3.
Determining the threshold TA in T-MAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.6.4.
One solution of the early sleeping problem in T-MAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.6.5.
Advantages of T-MAC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.6.6.
Disadvantages of T-MAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.7.
Dynamic sensor MAC (DS-MAC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
E-mail address: adhikari.ratan@gmail.com

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2014.01.011
1084-8045 & 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: Adhikari R. A meticulous study of various medium access control protocols for wireless sensor networks.
Journal of Network and Computer Applications (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2014.01.011i
R. Adhikari / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()
3.8.
3.9.
Eyes MAC (EMACs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

WiseMAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.9.1.
Advantages of WiseMAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.9.2.
Disadvantages of WiseMAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.10. Sift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.10.1.
Advantages of sift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.10.2. Disadvantages of sift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.11. Optimized MAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.12. Trafc adaptive medium access protocol (TRAMA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.12.1.
Advantages of TRAMA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.12.2. Disadvantages of TRAMA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.13. Self-organizing MAC (SMACs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.14. Energy aware TDMA based MAC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.15. Berkeley media access control (B-MAC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.16. Data gathering MAC (D-MAC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.16.1.
Advantages of D-MAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.16.2. Disadvantages of D-MAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.17. Lightweight medium access protocol (LMAC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.18. Pattern MAC (PMAC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.19. Zebra MAC (Z-MAC). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.20. X-MAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.21. Funneling-MAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4. Discussions and future research directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1. Introduction
An overwhelming raise in the demand for collecting and
utilizing information about the surroundings has been observed
throughout the last decade. A breakthrough in this domain is the
concept of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) which can process
and disseminate knowledge in notably fast speed (Cal et al.,
2007). WSNs are benecial over many other traditional networks
in terms of cost, size and efciency. Over the years, these networks
have been used in diversied elds such as cell phone monitoring,
robotic exploration, intrusion detection, disaster management,
climate control, and temperature pressure monitoring (Yadav
et al., 2009; Akyildiz et al., 2002). A typical WSN consists of a
large number of sensor nodes which are distributed in the
environment to collectively constitute a multi-hop wireless network. Each sensor node is composed of an embedded processor,
low power radio and limited memory unit. These nodes are
operated through batteries and are organized to perform a
common task (Ye et al., 2002). Due to low power capacities of
the sensor nodes, a WSN has limited coverage and range for
communication as compared to other mobile devices. Thus, such a
network must contain large number of interconnecting nodes for
successful practical applications.
Sensor networks have different issues and challenges depending
on the situations they are applied for. One crucial challenge faced is
energy consumption. It is often very difcult to change or replace the
exhausted batteries of the constituent nodes in a sensor network
which is an obvious obstacle in maximizing the network lifetime. In
order to reduce the energy consumption, a major objective of a
sensor network is to minimize the associated communication while
achieving the desired network operation (Yadav et al., 2009;
Demirkol et al., 2006). Extensive research works have been carried
out on the design of low power electronic devices to reduce energy
consumption in sensor networks. However, due to hardware limitations and manufacturing costs it has been observed that substantial
energy consumption can be more economically achieved through
designing energy efcient communication protocols.
It is an incredibly challenging task to create a wireless sensor
network that implements energy efcient medium access rules
among the heavily populated low capacity sensor nodes (Demirkol

et al., 2006). Medium Access Control (MAC) is an important
technique for the successful and smooth operation of a sensor
network. MAC species a set of rigorous rules which enables the
associated WSN to perform the desired network operations in an
energy efcient manner. Designing highly effective power saving
MAC protocols is a major way to considerably prolong the sensor
network's lifetime. Also, one of the fundamental objectives of a
typical MAC protocol is to prevent interfering nodes from colliding
while communication (Yadav et al., 2009; Ye et al., 2002). In this
regard, a number of attributes must have to be considered while
designing a good MAC protocol for a WSN (Ye et al., 2002). The
rst is the energy efciency. The nodes in a WSN are assumed to be
dead when they are out of battery and as such the proposed MAC
protocol must be effective enough to reduce the potential energy
wastes during data transmissions. Next important attributes are the
scalability and adaptability to changes. The designed MAC protocol
should efciently as well as rapidly handle the changes in network
topology, size and node density for a successful adaptation. Another
important attribute is the fairness. In traditional WSNs, each user
desires equal opportunity and time to access the medium and so
per-hop MAC level fairness is important. However, in sensor networks, all nodes cooperate for a single common task and normally
there is only one application; at a certain time, a node may have
considerably more data to send than some other nodes. Thus,
fairness is not so important as long as application-level performance
is not degraded. Other attributes, e.g. latency, throughput and
bandwidth utilization may be useful but are secondary in WSNs.
Designing MAC protocols for WSNs is an active research area
having important contributions from numerous researchers. During the last decade, several MAC protocols have been developed
for wireless voice and data communication networks which can be
broadly classied into two major categories: contention based and
schedule based protocols (Ye et al., 2002). Looking at the increasing
number of MAC protocols which have been accumulated in the
sensor network literature over the past few years, a thorough and
systematic study of them is very important from the perspective of
future innovative works in this domain. This paper is destined to
meticulously discuss about a wide variety of MAC protocols for
WSNs, emphasizing their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Various associated issues and challenges, such as collision avoidance, idle listening, and overhearing are lucidly discussed. In order
to provide an up-to-date survey, several recently proposed MAC
protocols are described together with the well-known benchmark
ones. Finally, the paper provides a comparison of the studied MAC
protocols and outlines a number of innovative ideas and potential
future research directions in this domain.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2
discusses the major challenges which are faced in a MAC protocol
design and points out the characteristics as well as different
evaluation metrics with regards to a potentially good MAC protocol for WSN. Section 3 describes a wide variety of MAC protocols
together with their inherent merits and demerits. In this section,
altogether 21 MAC protocols are studied, including both the wellknown traditional ones and those which have been developed
fairly recently. Then, Section 4 concisely compares the studied
MAC protocols and outlines a number of open issues and future
research directions. Finally, the paper is concluded in Section 5.
2. Design and implementation issues of MAC

protocols for WSN
The prime objective of a MAC protocol is to substantially
increase the lifetime of the WSN through reducing the potential
energy wastes during communication. To achieve this goal, a
proposed MAC protocol must address and attempt to resolve all
sources of energy waste in a sensor network operation. In this
section, we discuss the major reasons for energy consumption and
summarize the properties which a good MAC protocol for WSN
must satisfy.
2.1. Primary reasons of energy waste
In a sensor network consisting of a dense population of battery
powered nodes, it is very difcult to maintain the required energy
supplies to all nodes. Hence, increasing the lifetime of the WSN is
of course a crucial challenge. The energy consumption in a WSN
occurs in three domains (Cal et al., 2007): sensing, data processing
and communication. The major sources and reasons of energy
waste are discussed below (Cal et al., 2007; Yadav et al., 2009;
Demirkol et al., 2006; Van Dam and Langendoen, 2003):
Collision: When a receiver node receives more than one packet

at the same time, these packets are then called collided packets.
All packets which cause the collision have to be discarded and
the subsequent follow-on retransmissions considerably
increase energy consumption. The occurrence of collision
increases latency as well.
Overhearing: It refers to the phenomenon where a sensor node
picks up the packets which are intended for some other nodes.
This results in wastage of network energy.
Protocol overhead: Control packets in a WSN do not contain
useful information and so their transmissions consume unnecessary energy.
Idle listening: A major source of energy waste in a WSN is idle
listening, i.e. listening to receive possible trafc from an idle
channel which is actually sending nothing. This happens in
most WSNs as a node goes to an idle state if nothing is sensed.
Over emitting: Energy waste by over emitting occurs through
transmission of a message when the intended destination node
is not yet ready.
Adaptation: It refers to reconguring a WSN when nodes join
or leave the arrangement and is also a major source of
energy waste.
2.2. Properties of a good MAC protocol

A well-designed MAC protocol must have to satisfy certain
important properties. The primary among them is to effectively
prevent the energy wastes from all the aforementioned possible
sources (Yadav et al., 2009; Demirkol et al., 2006). A MAC protocol
should also possess a number of additional characteristics, such as
(i) energy efciency, (ii) scalability and adaptability to changes in
the network properties, (iii) fairness, (iv) latency and (v) throughput
and bandwidth utilization. Moreover, there should be robust
measures in order to evaluate as well as compare the performances of various developed MAC protocols. In this regard, the
following evaluation metrics are widely used by WSN researchers
(Yadav et al., 2009).
Bitwise energy consumption: It is dened as the ratio of the total

energy consumed by a sensor node and the total number of bits

transmitted. Obviously, for two MAC protocols, the one having
a lesser value of this metric is more energy efcient than
the other.
Average packet latency: It measures the average time taken by
the dispatched packets to reach the destination nodes. The
lesser the value of this metric, the better is the performance of
the designed MAC protocol.
Average delivery ratio: It is dened as the average ratio of the
number of packets received to the number of packets sent for
all sensor nodes.
Throughput: The throughput of a network is a count of the total
number of packets delivered to the destination node per unit
of time.
These four metrics are very useful in assessing the performance

of a designed MAC protocol. The numerical values of these metrics
measure the competence of a MAC protocol in terms of energy
efciency, latency and throughput.
3. Various developed MAC protocols for WSN

For a WSN, designing a good MAC protocol that satises the
characteristics as discussed in Section 2 is indeed a challenging
task. There are several obstacles, encountered while routing in
such networks. The major among them is the architecture of the
sensor network itself. A typical WSN is composed of a large
number of low-powered sensor nodes which are constrained in
supplies of energy, bandwidth, storage and processing ability
(Akkaya and Younis, 2005). The constituent sensor nodes are in
general stationary having non-rechargeable and irreplaceable
limited capacity batteries. These factors make them prone to
severe energy deciency during data communication. The deployment of sensor nodes in a typical end-to-end IP-enabled WSN
architecture is shown in Fig. 1. Second, the classical IP-based
protocols are inapplicable in sensor networks as it is practically
impossible to create a global addressing scheme for such a
network. Third, in almost all sensor networks, sensed data from
multiple sources are communicated to one particular sink. This is
contrary to other familiar communication networks, such as
wireless ad hoc and wired networks. Fourth, in order to improve
energy and bandwidth utilization, an efcient routing protocol
must have a well-dened mechanism to exploit data redundancy.
Such redundancies are common in a sensor network as different
sensors may generate the same data within a neighborhood.
Considering the mentioned challenges, any routing protocol for a
WSN in a nutshell should effectively address these six issues
(Akkaya and Younis, 2005; Tilak et al., 2002): (i) network dynamics,
Fig. 1. Deployment of sensor nodes in a typical end-to-end IP-enabled wireless sensor network.
MAC protocols
for WSN
Contention based
Technology
CSMA
Merits
Schedule based
Example
Technology
IEEE 802.11
TDMA
Demerit
Much energy
consuming
Easily adaptable to
topology changes
Relaxed time
synchronizations
Merit
Example
Bluetooth
Demerits
Highly energy
efficient
Strict time
synchronizations
Hard to adapt to
topology changes
Fig. 2. Classication of MAC protocols for wireless sensor network.
(ii) deployment of sensor nodes, (iii) node capabilities, (iv) energy

consumptions, (v) data delivery schemes and (vi) data aggregation or
fusion.
Although MAC protocols for WSNs is a relatively new domain of
research, but a number of important contributions in this topic
have already been made which can be found in literature. Till date,
there exist several MAC protocols, designed with different perspectives (Yadav et al., 2009; Ye et al., 2002; Demirkol et al., 2006;
Van Hoesel and Havinga, 2004). A systematic classied study of
these developed MAC protocols is very essential for further
innovations in this area. Present MAC protocols for WSNs can be
broadly categorized into two major classes: contention based and
schedule based protocols (Yadav et al., 2009; Ye et al., 2002). The
Fig. 3. Three communicating nodes in a network conguration.
contention based protocols are mostly based on the Carrier Sense

Multiple Access (CSMA) technique and are popular due to their
simplicity and robustness. These protocols can easily adjust to the
network topology changes and also have relaxed time synchronization requirements. However, these are affected by large amount
of energy wastes through collisions, overhearing and idle listening.
A recent study has found that the energy consumption using
the contention based protocol IEEE 802.11 is very high due to
Fig. 4. Communication pattern of the MACAW protocol.
signicant idle listening (Stemm and Katz, 1997). On the other

hand, the scheduled based protocols are based on the Time
Dependent Multiple Access (TDMA) technology and are considerably
more energy efcient than their contention based counterparts.
The scheduled based protocols require strict time synchronizations and avoid collisions, overhearing and idle listening among
the sensor nodes through scheduling transmit and listen periods.
However, in TDMA protocols, e.g. Bluetooth (Haartsen, 2000) and
LEACH (Heinzelman et al., 2000), the nodes form various clusters
and managing the communications among such clusters is a quite
difcult task. A TDMA protocol cannot easily modify its frame
length and time slot arrangements according to the changes in the
number of clusters or the number of nodes within the clusters.
Hence, its adaptability to the changes in network topology is not as
efcient as that of a contention based protocol. The classication
of MAC protocols for WSNs is depicted in Fig. 2.
In this section, we discuss about various important MAC
protocols which are proposed in literature for WSNs. We start
with the well-known traditional protocols and gradually advance
towards the more recent ones. The essential features of the
proposed MAC protocols, together with their advantages and
disadvantages are presented in a lucid manner. For sake of their
great importance, some benchmark MAC protocols are described
with more details.
3.1. MACA
This protocol was proposed by Karn (Karn, 1990) as an alternative to the traditional CSMA technology for sensor networks.
Unlike the carrier sense methodology, the exchange between
Request-to-send (RTS) and Clear-to-send (CTS) packets in MACA
enables collision avoidance at the receiver side and not at the
sender. This protocol is briey explained with the help of the
network conguration with three nodes A, B and C, as shown
in Fig. 3.
The xed size signaling packets: RTS and CTS, both of which
contain the proposed length of the data transmission are used in
communication through MACA. Station A willing to transmit to
station B sends an RTS to station B to which station B replies
immediately with a CTS if it is ready to hear and not deferring at
that moment. Station A sends the intended data to station B
immediately after receiving the CTS. The stations overhearing the
RTS and CTS packets defer all transmissions up to a predened
duration of time. Station A times out ultimately if it does not hear
the expected CTS from station B, assuming that a collision has
occurred and then schedule the packet for retransmission. The
retransmission time in MACA is selected through the binary
exponential back-off (BEB) algorithm (Bharghavan et al., 1994).
MACA ensures that a station hearing an RTS will wait enough
so that the transmitting station can receive the returning CTS. On
the other hand, any station hearing the CTS will avoid colliding
with the returning data transmission. The stations which hear an
RTS but not a CTS can perform data transmissions without any
harm after the CTS has been sent. This is because such stations are
not prone to collision as they are out of range of the receiver.
Let us now demonstrate the working of this protocol in a
practical scenario. In the network conguration of Fig. 3, station B
can hear both A and C, but stations A and C cannot hear each other.
The hidden terminal scenario occurs when C attempts to transmit
while A is transmitting to B. Similarly, an exposed terminal scenario
occurs when B is transmitting to A while C attempts to transmit.

Employing MACA in the hidden terminal scenario, station C would
not hear the RTS from station A but would hear the CTS from
station B and so would defer from transmitting during A's
transmission. On the other hand, in the exposed terminal scenario,
station C would hear the RTS from station B but not the CTS from
station A and thus would be free to transmit during B's data
transmission.
MACA is simple to understand and implement. It often successfully avoids collisions during data transmission. It also effectively
handles the hidden and exposed terminal scenarios. But, the main
disadvantages of this protocol are the high energy consumption
due to idle listening, lack of synchronization of RTSCTS transmissions, and lack of adequate fairness level in many one-cell
communication congurations (Bharghavan et al., 1994).
3.2. MACAW
MACAW is a slotted MAC protocol, proposed by Bharghavan
et al. (1994) as a modication to the MACA protocol. In this
protocol, collision avoidance is achieved through introducing Data
Sending (DS) and Acknowledgment (ACK) packets together with the
usual RTS/CTS packets of MACA. MACAW uses an RTSCTSDS
DATAACK message exchange scheme and includes a back-off
algorithm that is considerably different from the one used by the
MACA protocol.
MACAW protocol was mainly introduced to extend the functionalities of the MACA protocol and it does not use the carrier
sensing methodology but is based on a different approach.
MACAW requires a sensor node to send a DS packet just before
sending the actual data for making the neighboring nodes aware
of the fact that the RTSCTS exchange was successful. In order to
explain the working principle of MACAW, we consider a simple
network conguration with ve sensor nodes: A, B, C, D and E, as
shown in Fig. 4.
We assume that the node B wants to transmit data to the node
C in the network conguration of Fig. 4. Then, a possible successful
data transmission using MACAW involves the following sequence
of steps:
1. B sends an RTS to C which is also heard by A.
2. C replies with the CTS which is also heard by D.
3. B now sends the DS to A to inform that the RTSCTS exchange
was successful.
4. B then starts sending the data packet to C.
5. Now, let E attempts to transmit data to D and so sends an RTS
to D. D hears the RTS but will not reply due to the ongoing
transmission to C.
6. After the transmission was successful, C sends an ACK to B.
7. Now, D is allowed to transmit the data and so sends a Request
for RTS (RRTS) to E so that E becomes aware of the successful
transmission and the idle channel.
It should be noted that MACAW adopts a non-persistent
mechanism. This means that if the transmission contains more
than one packet, A has to wait for a random time after every
successful data transfer and then again has to compete with the
adjacent nodes for gaining access to the transmission medium.
MACAW is widely popular due to its simple yet rigorous packet
transmission mechanism and many MAC protocols for WSN are
in some situations. Although, the RRTS packet is introduced as a

remedial measure, but still it cannot solve all such contention
based problems (Bharghavan et al., 1994).
3.3. IEEE 802.11
Fig. 5. The S-MAC mechanism: (a) periodic listen/sleep and (b) inter-cluster
synchronization.
Fig. 6. The communication mechanism in S-MAC.
The IEEE 802.11 is a familiar contention based MAC protocol

that is primarily developed on the methodology of MACAW. It uses
carrier sensing and randomized back-offs to avoid collisions of the
data packets. The contention mechanism in IEEE 802.11 is same as
that of MACAW. It uses the usual RTS and CTS packets to manage
transmission. The sensor node that rst sends the RTS packet gains
access to the medium and the receiver node will respond with a
CTS packet. Once the data transmission is started, the nodes do not
follow their sleep (i.e. idle listening) schedules until the transmission is completed. The IEEE 802.11 protocol reduces the idle
listening by periodically entering into the sleep state through the
Power Save Mode (PSM) (Yadav et al., 2009). This protocol also
supports fragmentation of the communication packets. The RTS
and CTS packets reserve the medium only for the rst data
fragment and the rst ACK. The rst fragment and ACK then
reserves the medium for the second fragment and ACK and so on.
Thus, each neighboring node receiving a fragment or an ACK
knows that there is one more fragment to be sent and so it keeps
listening until all the fragments are sent. But, this mechanism is
amenable to a lot of energy waste through overhearing by all
neighboring nodes.
The IEEE 802.11 is widely used in wireless ad hoc and sensor
networks due to its straightforward methodology, simple time
synchronization, and collision avoidance mechanism. For singlehop networks, it reduces a lot of energy waste from idle listening
by using the PSM technique. This protocol is also found to provide
simple and robust solution to the problem of hidden terminal (Ye
et al., 2002). However, it has a very high energy consumption rate
due to overhearing. The fragmentation mechanism lets a node to
unnecessarily wait even if no further fragment or ACK has to be
received. Also, all the neighboring nodes overhear the transmission between two nodes in the network. All these processes waste
a lot of precious energy.
3.4. Power aware multi-access signaling (PAMAS)
Fig. 7. Energy saving vs. average sleep delay for S-MAC protocol.
based on it. It provides considerably more effective collision

avoidance as compared to MACA. It is also easily adaptable to
changes in network topology and supports varieties of communication patterns. Furthermore, MACAW is also known to provide
robust solution to the hidden terminal problem (Ye et al., 2002).
However, like MACA, energy consumption in MACAW is often high
due to idle listening of the constituent sensor nodes. Another
problem faced by MACAW is the lack of synchronizing information
PAMAS (Singh and Raghavendra, 1998) is one of the earliest

contention based MAC protocols, specically designed for wireless
ad hoc networks with energy efciency being its primary goal.
This protocol later inuenced the design of many other advanced
MAC protocols, such as the Sensor MAC (S-MAC) (Ye et al., 2002).
This protocol deliberately turns off the sensor nodes which are not
receiving or sending any data in order to conserve energy. A sensor
node sets its radio to sleep during transmissions of other nodes.
PAMAS uses two separate channels for RTS/CTS control and
data packets. A node with a packet to transmit sends an RTS over
the control channel and waits for the CTS from the receiving node.
The transmitting node enters into a back-off state if no CTS arrives
for a predened duration and if a CTS arrives within the speculated time, the transmitting node sends the data over the data
channel. The receiving node transmits a busy tone over the control
channel to let the other nodes in the network know about its busy
status. The use of two radios at every sensor node in the different
frequency bands in PAMAS leads to considerable increase in the
sensor cost, size and design complexity. Also, excessive switching
between sleep and wakeup states results a lot of energy
consumption.
Fig. 8. Communication patterns of the MAC protocols: (a) S-MAC and (b) T-MAC.
3.5. Sensor MAC (S-MAC)

The S-MAC (Ye et al., 2002) is a contention based MAC protocol,
specically designed for wireless sensor networks as a signicant
enhancement of the earlier IEEE 802.11 protocol. S-MAC is conceptually inspired by the PAMAS protocol, but unlike PAMAS, it
does not require an additional channel for communication. It uses
three novel techniques, viz. periodic listensleep, virtual clustering
and message passing in order to reduce energy consumption and
support self-conguration. The sensor nodes periodically wake up,
communicate data and again return to sleep. During the sleep
period, the sensor nodes turn off their radios and after the sleep
period, they wake up to listen whether communication is
addressed to them. If the awaked nodes nd that there is nothing
communicated towards them and they have their own data to
transmit, then they can initiate communication themselves. The
sleep and listen periods are locally synchronized among the nodes.
However, this synchronization is not very strict and the nodes can
use their sleep period for communication if needed. Neighboring
nodes form virtual clusters to set up a common sleep schedule.
Two neighboring nodes, residing in two different clusters wake up
at listen periods of both the clusters. The periodic listen/sleep and
inter-cluster synchronization are illustrated in Fig. 5(a) and
(b) respectively. As can be seen from Fig. 5(b), the nodes A and B
belong to two neighboring clusters and so they synchronize with
nodes C and D, respectively. If A wants to communicate with B, it
just waits until B is still listening. Similarly, if multiple neighboring
nodes want to communicate with one particular node, they must
have to contend for the medium when the node is listening.
Schedule exchange and period synchronization in S-MAC are
accomplished by sending a short SYNC packet which includes the
address of the sender and its next time to sleep. The nodes which
receive this SYNC packet, immediately update their timers and a
node goes to sleep when its timer expires. The period for every
node to send a SYNC packet is called the synchronization period.
The listen interval of a node is divided into two parts so that it can
receive both synchronization and data packets. Each part is further
divided into many time slots for adequately performing carrier
sensing. An example of communication through S-MAC is shown
in Fig. 6 which was given by Ye et al. (2002). This gure depicts the
timing relationship between a receiver and several senders, where
CS stands for carrier sense.
Collision avoidance which is basic to any MAC protocol is
performed through a carrier sense scheme in S-MAC. Both virtual
and physical carrier sense together with RTS/CTS exchange is
performed in S-MAC (Ye et al., 2002). For virtual carrier sensing, a
duration eld called Network Allocation Vector (NAV) is introduced in
each transmitted packet. The NAV indicates how long the remaining
transmission will be. When a sensor node wants to communicate, it
rst looks at the NAV and if the value of the NAV is non-zero, then it
is understood that the medium is busy. Physical carrier sensing is
performed at the physical layer by listening to the communication
channel for possible transmissions.
S-MAC introduces an effective policy to substantially reduce
overhearing. Each node calculates and maintains its NAV value to
indicate the activity of the neighboring nodes. When a node
receives a packet which is actually destined to other nodes, it
immediately updates its NAV by the duration eld in the packet. In

this manner, the node realizes the time for which it has to remain
silent. A non-zero NAV value means that active transmissions are
in process in the neighborhood. Also, the NAV value decrements
every time when the NAV timer res. So, in order to avoid
overhearing, a node should sleep if its NAV is not zero and can
wake up again when its NAV becomes zero.
A very important feature of S-MAC is the concept of message
passing where long messages are divided into small frames and
sent in a burst. The disadvantages of transmitting a long message
as a single packet are the high cost of re-transmitting if only a few
bits have been corrupted in the rst transmission. Through
fragmentation of the long message into many independent small
packets, considerable energy saving can be achieved by minimizing communication overhead at the expense of unfairness in
medium access (Ye et al., 2002; Demirkol et al., 2006).
Another salient feature of S-MAC is the adaptive listening.
Periodic sleeping may result in high latency, especially for multihop routing algorithms. Adaptive listening improves the latency
caused by periodic sleeping (also known as sleep delay) and in turn
improves the overall latency (Demirkol et al., 2006). This scheme
requires that an overhearing node wakes up for a short duration at
the end of the transmission, so that if it is the next-hope node,
then its neighbor could pass the data immediately. The duration
eld of the RTS/CTS packets is used by the sensor nodes to know
the end of the active transmissions.
3.5.1. An empirical demonstration of energy saving vs.
increased latency
S-MAC provides reasonably large amount of energy saving,
however with the expense of increased latency and as such an
analysis of the tradeoff between these two factors is useful. A
packet moving through a typical multi-hop network experiences
the following delays at each hop: carrier sense delay, back-off delay,
transmission delay, propagation delay, processing delay and queuing
delay. These six delays are common to any contention based MAC
protocol. S-MAC introduces the additional sleep delay which is the
delay caused by periodic listening. The effect of this delay was
analyzed by Ye et al. (2002) which we present here.
Let us consider that a packet arrives at the sender with equal
probability of time for listen and sleep. Also, let a frame refers to
one complete cycle of listen and sleep. Then, the average sleep
delay Ds on the transmitting node is
Ds T f rame=2
where
T f rame T listen T sleep
In the above equations, Tlisten, Tsleep and Tframe denote the listen,
sleep and frame time, respectively. Now, comparing with the
protocols which do not have the periodic sleep mechanism, the
relative energy saving Es in S-MAC can be given as
Es
T sleep
1
T f rame
T listen
T f rame
The last term in Eq. (3) is the duty cycle of the respective node.
It is desirable to have the listen time as short as possible, so that
different schedules, then a lot of energy is consumed from idle

listening and overhearing. Furthermore, the sleep and listen
periods in S-MAC are predened constants which results in high
latency, low throughput and less efciency under variable trafc
load (Demirkol et al., 2006).
3.6. Timeout MAC (T-MAC)
Fig. 9. A basic data exchange operation in the T-MAC protocol.
Fig. 10. The early sleeping problem with the T-MAC protocol.
Fig. 11. Depiction of a solution to the early sleeping problem in T-MAC.
for a certain duty cycle, the average sleep delay is short. The
percentage of energy saving Es vs. sleep delay Ds on each node for
the listen time of 300 ms and 200 ms is depicted in Fig. 7.
From Fig. 7, we can see that even if the sleep time for a node is
zero which indicates no sleeping, there is still a delay. This
happens because of the fact that contention only starts at the
beginning of each listen interval.
3.5.2. Advantages of S-MAC
S-MAC is conceptually simple to understand and implement,
yet provides very good energy conserving compared to various
other contention based protocols, especially the IEEE 802.11. In
S-MAC, energy waste is substantially reduced as well as time
synchronization overhead is prevented to a large extent through
sleep schedules. This protocol also does not require very strict time
synchronization and the sensor nodes can even use their sleep
periods for communicating. Another salient feature of S-MAC is
that it is able to make tradeoffs between energy saving and latency
as per the network trafc situation.
3.5.3. Disadvantages of S-MAC
Although straightforward but S-MAC allows a low duty cycle
unless the active time is signicantly smaller than the wakeup
period (Anastasi et al., 2009). Another drawback of the S-MAC
protocol is that when two neighboring clusters follow entirely
As stated earlier, one major drawback of S-MAC is the constant

listen and sleep periods which lead to low duty cycle and high
latency. The static listen/sleep period also considerably degrades
the performance of S-MAC under variable network trafc load. In
S-MAC, a sensor node remains awake for the whole awake period
even if there is no active communication. The T-MAC protocol (Van
Dam and Langendoen, 2003) is designed to overcome these
drawbacks of S-MAC and to enhance its overall performance. TMAC increases the duty cycle through shortening the awake
period of the idle channel. It lets the sensor nodes to turn off
their radios if no activity is detected for at least a timeout value
(Anastasi et al., 2009). A node listens to the channel for the
predened timeout period and if no data is received during this
period, it returns to sleep mode. But, if some data is received, then
the node remains awake until the timeout or awake period,
whichever is shorter. The communication mechanism of T-MAC
is briey explained below.
T-MAC reduces idle listening and overhearing by transmitting
all messages in bursts of variable lengths and allowing nodes to
sleep between bursts. All messages are properly queued and nodes
communicate with each other using a RTSCTSDATAACK
scheme. In order to maintain an optimal active time under variable
load, the concept of timeout period is additionally introduced. The
diagrammatic comparison between S-MAC and T-MAC communication pattern is shown in Fig. 8(a) and (b).
3.6.1. Clustering and synchronization in T-MAC
Like S-MAC, T-MAC adopts virtual clustering for frame synchronization (Van Dam and Langendoen, 2003). A node begins
waiting and listening, once it becomes active. If it hears nothing
for certain duration of time, it chooses a frame schedule and
transmits a SYNC packet which contains the time until the next
frame starts. On the other hand, if the node hears a SYNC packet
from other nodes during startup, it follows the schedule in that
packet and transmits its own SYNC accordingly. Nodes must listen
for a complete SYNC frame sporadically to be aware of the
existence of different schedules. This allows new and mobile
nodes to adapt to an existing group.
If a node having a schedule of its own hears a SYNC with a
different schedule, then it has to adopt both schedules and also
has to transmit its own SYNC to the other node, so that the other
node can know the presence of another schedule. In this manner,
through adopting both schedules, the node will have an activation
event at the start of both frames. Nodes must start a data
transmission only when their own active time starts. At that time,
both neighbors have the same schedule and also the neighbors
that have adopted the schedule as extra are awake.
The virtual clustering technique is easy to implement in T-MAC.
It requires communicating nodes to form clusters with the same
schedule without enforcing this schedule to other nodes in the
network. This mechanism provides efcient broadcast without
requiring the need to maintain information on individual
neighbors.
3.6.2. RTS operation in T-MAC
In T-MAC, each node transmits its queued messages in a burst
at the start of the frame and during this burst, the medium is
saturated and messages are transmitted at maximum rate. A node

may have to ght ercely every time for winning the medium
when it sends an RTS. An increasing contention interval is not
useful as the load is often very large and remains constant
throughout. Thus, RTS transmission in T-MAC starts by waiting
and listening for a random time within a xed contention interval
which is intentionally tuned for the maximum load. The contention time is always used, even if no collision has occurred yet.
Further, the listen period ends when no activation event has
occurred for a predened time threshold TA which is known as
the timeout period. Selection of TA must cope with the early
sleeping problem, described later. In Fig. 9, we present the
illustration of a basic data exchange in T-MAC.
In Fig. 9, it can be seen that node C overhears the CTS from
node B and will not disturb the communication between A and B.
The threshold TA must be long enough in order to allow C to hear
the start of the CTS.
3.6.3. Determining the threshold TA in T-MAC
T-MAC requires that a node should not go to sleep while its
neighbors are still communicating, since it may be the receiver of a
subsequent message. But, there is possibility that a node may fall
asleep earlier than the speculated time and this is known as the
early sleeping problem (Van Dam and Langendoen, 2003). The
broken synchronization among listen periods within the virtual
clusters is the main reason for this undesired problem (Demirkol
et al., 2006). An example of early sleeping is depicted in Fig. 10, in
which we can see that the node D goes to sleep before C can send
an RTS packet to it. In order to prevent this early sleeping problem,
the T-MAC threshold period TA must have to be determined
adequately.
Receiving the start of the RTS/CTS packet from a neighbor is
enough to trigger a renewed interval TA. But, a node may not hear
this because it lies outside the range and as such the threshold
period TA must have to be long enough so that a neighboring node
at least hear the start of the CTS packet if it did not hear the RTS
packet, in case. This observation gives us a lower limit on the
length of the interval TA:
TA 4 C R T
where C and R are respectively the lengths of the contention

interval and an RTS packet, whereas T is the turn-around time, i.e.
the short time between the end of the RTS packet and the
beginning of the CTS packet.
3.6.4. One solution of the early sleeping problem in T-MAC
The early sleeping problem often substantially degrades the
overall performance of the T-MAC protocol. The usual solution
which is used in T-MAC to guard against this problem is to
introduce a Future Request to Send (FRTS) packet together with
the usual RTS/CTS packets. The idea is to let another node know
that there is still a message for it but the sender itself is prohibited
from using the wireless sensor medium.
The scheme works as follows. If a node overhears a CTS packet
destined for another node, it may immediately send an FRTS
packet. The FRTS packet contains the length of the blocking data
communication which was in the CTS packet. A node must not
send an FRTS packet if it senses communication right after the CTS
or if it is prohibited from sending due to a prior RTS or CTS. A node
that receives an FRTS packet knows that it will be the future target
of an RTS packet and must be awake by that time. For the FRTS
solution to work, the threshold time TA must be increased with the
length of the CTS packet. An illustration of the discussed solution
to the early sleeping problem is depicted in Fig. 11. In this gure,
we can see that the CTS overhearing node C immediately sent an
FRTS to the node D which keeps D awake.
3.6.5. Advantages of T-MAC

T-MAC resolves the static listen/sleep problem which is a major
source of energy waste in the S-MAC protocol. The performance of
S-MAC under variable trafc load is considerably improved in TMAC. The proposers (Van Dam and Langendoen, 2003) have
shown that T-MAC uses only one fth of the energy used by SMAC for variable trafc loads. Moreover, the T-MAC is also based
on a loose time synchronization requirement.
3.6.6. Disadvantages of T-MAC
In spite of better results of T-MAC under variable trafc loads, it
leads to the early sleeping problem which is due to the broken
synchronization among listen periods in virtual clusters. Although,
a solution to this early sleeping problem is provided, as described
in Section 3.6.4, but it is not a robust one. The radio sensitivity
limits the range of overhearing and so the nodes lying outside the
range of ongoing communication go to sleep. This limits the data
forwarding process of T-MAC only to a few hops (Anastasi et al.,
2009). Furthermore, the reduction of energy waste for variable
trafc loads through adaptive duty cycling of T-MAC actually
comes at the undesired cost of reduced throughput and increased
latency.
3.7. Dynamic sensor MAC (DS-MAC)
DS-MAC (Lin et al., 2004) attempts to improve the performance
of S-MAC by decreasing the latency for delay-sensitive applications through adding a dynamic duty cycle feature. During communication, all sensor nodes start with the same duty cycle and
within the SYNC period, all nodes share their one-hop latency
value among themselves. In this manner, DS-MAC doubles the
duty cycle in order to keep the schedules of the neighbors
unaffected (Demirkol et al., 2006). A node shortens its sleep time
and announces it through the SYNC packet whenever it notices a
high value of the average one-hop latency. The sender node which
receives this decrease in sleep period signal checks its queue trafc
for possible packets which are intended to that receiver node. If
there is one such packet, the sender node decides to double its
duty cycle when its battery level is higher than a specied
threshold value.
The duty cycle doubling in DS-MAC is shown in Fig. 12. It has
been observed that the latency of DS-MAC is considerably better
than that of S-MAC. It has been also observed that DS-MAC has a
better average power consumption per packet (Lin et al., 2004).
3.8. Eyes MAC (EMACs)
EMACs, developed by Van Hoesel et al. (2004) is a TDMA based
MAC protocol which consists of a fully distributed and selforganizing scheme for communicating data in the wireless sensor
network. Each active node in EMACs periodically listens to the
channel and broadcasts a short control message. This control
message is used for medium access operations and also for gaining
useful information at reasonably low energy costs. The information, contained in the control message is used to create a maximal
independent set of nodes from the network which in turn builds a
connected network of nodes. All nodes in this set are the active
nodes, whereas the remaining others are the passive nodes. The
active nodes communicate with each other in a collision-free
manner. The passive nodes on the other hand do not actively
participate in the communication and are specically used for
energy saving through utilizing the framework of the connected
network. In this manner, EMACs reduces the protocol overhead for
passive nodes to a large extent and hence saves a lot of energy.
Although, the passive nodes may communicate with active nodes,
10
Fig. 12. Duty cycle doubling in DS-MAC.
Time slot
CR
TC
DATA
CR
TC
DATA
...
Fig. 13. Time slot division in EMACs.
but this communication is not guaranteed to be collision-free.

Another salient feature of EMACs is its self-organizing nature, due
to which it does not depend on a base station or central manager.
Like TDMA, EMACs divides the communication time into time
slots which the participating nodes can use for data transmission
without requiring to contend for the medium. However, unlike
TDMA, the time slots are not managed by a central manager in
EMACs. As usual, a sensor node can assign only one time slot to
itself which it fully controls. After the specied frame length which
contains several time slots, a node again has a period of time
reserved for it. The nodes select their own time slot on the basis of
local information only. A time slot for an active node is further
divided into three sections: Communication Request (CR), Trafc
Control (TC) and the Data section. In the CR section, an active node
listens for the incoming requests from the passive nodes. Then, in
the TC section, it transmits a short control message which contains
various valuable control and synchronization information. Nodes
also hear their neighboring TCs for gaining knowledge of the
communication situation in the neighborhood. Finally, the data
section can be used for the actual transmission of data. An
example of EMACs time slot division is shown in Fig. 13.
EMACs is straightforward, based on a exible framework and
greatly energy efcient. The simulations, performed by its developers (Van Hoesel et al., 2004) demonstrate that EMACs was able
to prolong the WSN lifetime 3055% in a static topology, whereas
it prolonged the network lifetime with a factor 2.94.2 in a
dynamic topology as compared to S-MAC.
3.9. WiseMAC
The WiseMAC (Enz et al., 2004) is a MAC protocol developed for
WSN which is similar to the previously developed spatial TDMA
and CSMA with preamble sampling (El-Hoiydi, 2004). It uses Nonpersistent CSMA (np-CSMA) with preamble sampling in order to
decrease idle listening. In preamble sampling, all sensor nodes
have two communication channels, viz. data channel and control
channel which are respectively accessed through TDMA and CSMA
(Yadav et al., 2009). The receiving node is alerted by a preamble
which precedes each data packet. All nodes sample the medium
with a common period, but their relative schedule offsets are
independent. The preamble size is initially set equal to the sample
period. After waking up if a node nds the medium as busy, it
samples the medium and continues to listen until it receives a data
packet or the medium becomes idle again. However, there is a
possibility of energy waste through over emitting as the receiver
may not be ready at the end of the preamble. Over emitting is
further increased with the length of the preamble and the data
packet as no handshake is performed with the intended receiver.
Preamble sampling is prone to a lot of power consumption due
to the predened xed length of the preamble. As a remedial
Fig. 14. Concept of the WiseMAC protocol.
measure, WiseMAC attempts to dynamically determine this

length. Also, unlike preamble sampling, WiseMAC uses only one
communication channel to reduce the problem of idle listening. In
the WiseMAC scheme, the sensor nodes learn and refresh the
sleep schedules of their neighbors during every data exchange as a
part of the acknowledgment message. All transmissions are
scheduled on the basis of the knowledge of the neighbor's sleep
schedules. A random wake up time is also proposed to decrease
the collision possibilities.
The choice of the wake up preamble length is also affected by
the potential clock drift between the source and the destination
nodes. A lower bound for the preamble length is calculated as the
minimum of the sampling period Tw of the destination node and
the potential clock drift with the destination. Considering this
lower bound, a preamble length, Tp is chosen randomly. The
concept of WiseMAC protocol, as discussed above is concisely
depicted in Fig. 14, due to Enz et al. (2004).
3.9.1. Advantages of WiseMAC
The dynamic determination of the length of the preamble
makes WiseMAC notably efcient under variable network trafc.
The scheme for handling clock drifts in this protocol lessens the
need for external time synchronization. It has been found through
simulations that WiseMAC achieves reasonably better performance than one of the S-MAC variants (Enz et al. (2004)).
3.9.2. Disadvantages of WiseMAC
WiseMAC allows decentralized listen/sleep schedules due to
which the neighbors of a sensor node have different sleep and
wake up times. This often results in redundancy in data transmission for broadcast type of communication which in turn leads to
higher power consumption and latency (Demirkol et al., 2006).
Moreover, WiseMAC suffers from the hidden terminal problem
just like spatial TDMA and CSMA with preamble sampling and so,
the chances of collisions are dramatically increased.
3.10. Sift
Sift (Jamieson et al., 2006) is a randomized CSMA based MAC
protocol which is primarily proposed for event-driven wireless
sensor networks. In many CSMA protocols, multiple nodes in the
same neighborhood often sense a common event and as such it is
sufcient to consider the report of only that particular subset of
nodes which sense that event. However, traditional CSMA protocols, e.g. IEEE 802.11 do not possess adequate mechanism to
handle this situation and as such provide degraded latency and
throughput. This is the key motivating factor behind the development of Sift. Unlike traditional CSMA, Sift does not use a time
varying contention window from which a time slot is randomly
picked by a node. Rather, it keeps a xed size of the contention

window and each slot within this window is transmitted through
a carefully chosen non-uniform probability distribution. This
mechanism of Sift signicantly reduces the latency for the delivery
of event reports.
In a shared medium where N nodes sense an event and contend
to transmit on the channel at the same time, the goal of Sift is to
minimize the time taken to send the rst R (R rN) of these
messages without collisions. It should be noted that RN corresponds to the classical throughput optimization problem. Thus, the
basic idea of Sift is that out of the total N reports, only the rst R
are most crucial and so these have to be relayed with low latency.
A truncated, increasing geometric distribution is used as the backoff probability distribution in Sift for picking a transmission slot
within the xed size contention window. Due to its implementation simplicity, Sift is proposed to form a lower-layer building
block for various other future MAC protocols for WSNs (Jamieson
et al., 2006).
3.10.1. Advantages of sift
Sift achieves very low latency with a large network size in the
expense of energy consumption. But, slightly increased amount of
energy waste may be justied when latency is the major factor of
the concerned network. The authors have shown using simulations that Sift can provide a 7-fold latency reduction as compared
to IEEE 802.11 for network size of up to 500 sensor nodes.
Moreover, Sift is a simple window based CSMA protocol which is
notably easy to implement. As such, it has been proposed that Sift
can be used as a MAC layer lter for various other sensor
information dissemination protocols (Jamieson et al., 2006).
3.10.2. Disadvantages of sift
Sift increases energy consumption through idle listening and
overhearing. Idle listening occurs because all slots have to be
listened before transmitting. On the other hand, overhearing is
increased because nodes must have to listen till the end of an
ongoing transmission in order to contend for the next transmission. Moreover, Sift requires system-wise time synchronization
and as such it is quite costly to implement for the protocols which
do not use time synchronization (Demirkol et al., 2006).
3.11. Optimized MAC
The optimized MAC protocol (Yadav et al., 2008) attempts to
reduce energy consumption from idle listening, control packet
overhead and overhearing through controlling node latency on the
basis of network trafc. The duty cycles of the nodes are changed
based on the trafc load in a direct proportionate manner. This
means that the duty cycle of a node is more if the trafc is more
and is less if the trafc is low. The pending queue of messages is
used for identifying the extent of network trafc. The control
packet overhead is minimized by reducing the number and size of
the transmission packets. For reducing their size, the source and
destination addresses are removed from data and control packets.
Optimized MAC improves the performance of S-MAC through
adaptive duty cycle and control packet overhead minimization.
S-MAC achieves signicantly increased energy saving through
compromising sensor latency and as such, it may not be suitable
for delay sensitive applications. Optimized MAC, on the other hand
is good for applications where lower latency is a key goal apart
from energy efciency. The obtained simulation results by the
authors (Yadav et al., 2008) show that optimized MAC is highly
energy efcient under a wide range of trafc loads and is also able
to adapt itself to improve sensor latency for congested network
trafc.
11
3.12. Trafc adaptive medium access protocol (TRAMA)

TRAMA (Rajendran et al., 2003) is a TDMA based MAC protocol,
developed for collision free energy efcient channel access in
WSNs. Reduction of energy waste in TRAMA is achieved by
ensuring that unicast and broadcast packets never collide and
allowing the sensor nodes to enter into a low-power idle state
whenever they are transmitting or receiving nothing. It employs a
trafc adaptive election scheme to select the receivers on the basis
of the schedules announced by the transmitters. Nodes exchange
their two-hop neighborhood information and transmission schedules, indicating the intended receivers of their trafc. Then, the
nodes which should transmit and receive during each time slot are
selected in a proper order. This adaptive election scheme of
TRAMA ensures that all nodes within one-hop neighborhood of
the transmitter will receive data collision freely. It also successfully
eliminates the problem of hidden terminal. In a nutshell, TRAMA
consists of three components: Neighbor Protocol (NP), Schedule
Exchange Protocol (SEP) and Adaptive Election Algorithm (AEA).
A single, time-slotted channel is assumed in TRAMA for both
data and signal transmissions. Time is organized as random access
(known as signaling slot) and scheduled access (known as transmission slot) periods. Signaling slots are used to establish two-hop
topology information, whereas transmission slots are used for
collision free data exchange and schedule propagation. The length
of a transmission slot is xed with respect to channel bandwidth
and data size. As the signaling packets are normally smaller than
the data packets, so the transmission slots are set as a multiple of
the signaling slots for easy synchronization. A node announces its
intended slots and the intended recipients for these slots using a
schedule packet. The intended recipients are indicated in a schedule packet by using a bitmap whose length is equal to the
number of neighbors of the corresponding node. A node broadcasts that it renounces the allotted slots if it does not have
sufcient data to transmit. These vacant slots can be used by other
nodes for data transmission. The priority of a node on a particular
slot is calculated through a hash function. The time of the last
winning slot is xed as the lifetime for the schedule.
3.12.1. Advantages of TRAMA
TRAMA achieves higher percentage of sleep time of the sensor
nodes and less collision as compared to many CSMA based
protocols. Substantial amount of energy is saved during communication through this protocol. Also, as the intended recipients of a
message are indicated with a bitmap, so less extent of communication is performed as compared to other protocols for multicast
and broadcast type of communication patterns.
3.12.2. Disadvantages of TRAMA
In their experiments, the authors (Rajendran et al., 2003) select
the transmission slots seven times longer than the signaling slots.
But, as each sensor node is either in receiving or transmitting state
during the random access period, so this consideration signicantly increases the duty cycle. Moreover, each node in TRMA
calculates the priorities of its two-hop neighbor for a time slot and
repeats these calculations for every time slot assignment which
leads to considerable energy consumption by the nodes.
3.13. Self-organizing MAC (SMACs)
SMACs (Sohrabi et al., 2000) is a hybrid MAC protocol for WSNs
which uses TDMA and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) for
accessing the communication channel and frequency hopping. It
utilizes a distributed mechanism which enables the sensor nodes
to discover their neighbors and communicate with them without
12
the help of any local or global master nodes. After the deployment
of the nodes in the network, each node wakes up randomly
according to some predened distribution. It is assumed that the
nodes are able to turn their radios on or off and also they can tune
the carrier frequency to different bands. Unlike some earlier
methods, SMACs assigns a channel to a link immediately after
discovering the existence of the link. In this manner, nodes start
accumulating in a connected network, joined by concurrent links.
In order to reduce possible time collisions among slots between
adjacent links, distinct frequency bands are assigned to each link.
Once a link is established, a node has the knowledge about when
to turn on its radio for communicating. If no communications are
scheduled, it turns off its radio.
SMACs is particularly suitable for distributed sensor networks
in which there are a large number of static nodes with highly
constrained sources of energy. The ability of the nodes to discover
the neighbors and communicate with them leads to energy
efciency, reduced implementation cost and high adaptability to
network topology changes. However, a downside of this protocol is
the increasing possibilities for collisions and lack of time synchronization. Further, the allocated time slots are wasted if the sender
does not possess enough data to transmit to the recipient nodes
(Yadav et al., 2009).
3.14. Energy aware TDMA based MAC

It is a TDMA based MAC protocol for WSN whose primary goal
is to save energy consumption during network communication
(Arisha et al., 2002). In this protocol, different clusters of sensor
nodes in the network are formed and each node in the cluster is
managed by the gateway. The primary operations of a gateway are
to collect information about the sensor nodes within its own
cluster, allocate time slots to the constituent nodes, inform about
the time slots to all its intra-cluster nodes, perform fusion of data,
communicate with other gateways and nally transmit the data.
This protocol consists of four phases: data transfer, refresh, eventtriggered rerouting and refresh-based rerouting. Data is sent in the
allotted time slots during the data transfer phase. The sensor
nodes update their respective states, such as total energy level,
current position to their cluster's gateways in the refresh phase.
The gateways use the state information about the individual nodes
for transmitting data during event-triggered rerouting phase. The
refresh based rerouting periodically occurs after refreshing the
relevant information from the gateways and updating with new
information. The gateways perform the transmission and routing
during the two routing phases through executing the routing
algorithm.
The allocation of time slots is performed through graph parsing
strategy. Two approaches are proposed in this regard (Arisha et al.,
2002): Breadth First Search (BFS) and Depth First Search (DFS). BFS
assigns contiguous time slot numbers to the sensor nodes by
starting from the outermost node, whereas DFS assigns contiguous
time slots to the nodes on the route from outermost to the
gateway. The authors have performed experiments to analyze
the per-packet energy consumption, end-to-end delay, throughput, etc. for both BFS and DFS based time slot allocation. BFS
technique saves considerable amount of energy which is consumed by the sensor nodes in switching between ON/OFF states
and as such provides high lifetime of the sensor nodes. But, it
requires that the sensor nodes have sufcient buffer capacity and
as such it is prone to the buffer overow problem. On the other
hand, DFS does not save the energy consumption by the sensor
nodes in switching between the ON/OFF states but avoids the
buffer overow problem. However, it has low latency and high
throughput compared to BFS.
3.15. Berkeley media access control (B-MAC)

B-MAC (Polastre and Hill, 2004) is the most popular low
complexity contention based MAC protocol for WSNs which
provides a exible interface to achieve ultra low-power network
operation, effective collision avoidance and high channel utilization. B-MAC employs an adaptive preamble sampling mechanism
to reduce duty cycle and minimize idle listening so that signicantly low-power network operation can be performed. Duty cycle
reduction is achieved by using an asynchronous sleep/wake
scheme, viz. Low Power Listening (LPL) which is based on periodic
listening of the nodes. The sensor nodes wake up periodically to
sense the channel for network activity. The period between two
consecutive wake ups of a node is called the check interval,
whereas the period for which a node remains active after waking
up is called the wakeup time. Although, the wakeup time is xed,
the check interval may be application specic. The packets in BMAC are made up of a long preamble and payload, where the
preamble duration is at least equal to the check interval so that
every node can detect an ongoing transmission in the network
during its check interval. A salient feature of this approach is that
it does not require synchronization of the nodes (Anastasi et al.,
2009; Polastre and Hill, 2004).
B-MAC also supports on trip reconguration and bidirectional
interfaces for system services in order to optimize performance.
Adaptability to changing trafc and network conditions and
scalability to large number of nodes are other major design goals
of B-MAC. The whole implementation scheme of B-MAC is maintained through an intelligently designed robust analytical model
(Polastre and Hill, 2004). Through comparing B-MAC and S-MAC,
the authors found that the exible and adaptive characteristics of
B-MAC results in achieving signicantly better performance of BMAC in terms of packet delivery rates, latency, throughput and
also often energy efciency than S-MAC. These highly encouraging
ndings, together with the implementation simplicity, low complexity and exible design of B-MAC surely make it one of the top
priority choices in many practical wireless sensor network
applications.
3.16. Data gathering MAC (D-MAC)
In many sensor network applications, it is often common that a
large part of the trafc consists of data which are assembled from
various sources to a particular sink via a unidirectional tree. This
type of most frequently observed tree based communication
pattern in sensor networks is known as convergecast type of
communication. D-MAC (Lu et al., 2007) is a schedule based
adaptive duty cycle MAC protocol which is specically designed
and optimized for convergecast type of sensor network communication. The primary goal of D-MAC is to attain reasonably low
latency yet maintaining energy efciency. The earlier protocols,
such as S-MAC and T-MAC suffer from a data forwarding interruption problem which is caused because not all nodes on a multihop path to the destination can be notied about the ongoing data
transmission. This leads to signicant sleep delay as well as limits
the data forwarding process to only a few hops (Anastasi et al.,
2009). Such undesired shortcomings of earlier protocol are solved
in D-MAC by staggering the active/sleep schedules of the sensor
nodes according to their position in the data gathering tree, as
depicted in Fig. 15. This scheme allows delivery of packets
continuously because all nodes in a multi-hop path can now be
notied about the ongoing transmission. Latency is minimized by
assigning adjacent slots to the successive nodes in the data
gathering tree. Duty cycle of each sensor node is also adaptively
adjusted according to the trafc load by varying the number of
active slots in a schedule interval.
13
nodes deployment which is often difcult and may not be

practical.
LMAC is broadly inspired by the EMACs protocol. Like EMACs,
the network operations in LMAC are not controlled by a central
manger or base station and the nodes can choose their own time
slots on the basis of local information only. The obtained simulation results (Van Hoesel and Havinga, 2004) show that LMAC was
able to prolong the overall network lifetime by a factor of 2.4 and
3.8, as compared to EMACs and S-MAC respectively.
3.18. Pattern MAC (PMAC)
Fig. 15. Data gathering tree in D-MAC implementation.
In order to mitigate the problems of channel contention and

collisions, D-MAC further proposes a data prediction mechanism
and more to send (MTS) packets. The data prediction scheme allows
every child in the multi-hop path to get chance for transmitting its
packets. MTS packets on the other hand resolve the interference
problem among nodes on different branches of the tree. A soft
timer is also maintained to handle lack of schedule synchronization due to the accidental loss of the MTS packets.
3.16.1. Advantages of D-MAC

D-MAC is able to provide very good latency compared to other
sleep/listen based protocols and as such it can be a very good
choice for applications in which low latency is the primary
intention. The simulation results (Lu et al., 2007) show that DMAC signicantly outperformed S-MAC in terms of energy efciency, latency and throughput for both multi-hop chain topology
and random data gathering tree topology.
3.16.2. Disadvantages of D-MAC

One major drawback of D-MAC is that the data transmission
paths among the sources and the sink node may be unknown
beforehand which makes it impossible to build up the data
gathering tree. Further, D-MAC is often prone to packet collisions
due to the lack of a robust collision avoidance mechanism.
3.17. Lightweight medium access protocol (LMAC)
LMAC (Van Hoesel and Havinga, 2004) is a lightweight and
highly energy efcient MAC protocol which adopts a lowcomplexity mechanism for reserving the time slots. This protocol
achieves collision-free communications through TDMA, whereas
slot assignment and time synchronization through a selforganizing mechanism. The primary goal of this protocol is to
minimize the radio state transitions and signicantly reduce the
protocol overhead in the physical layer. Minimization of the radio
state switches makes the sensor nodes adaptive to the trafc load
and also limits the implementation cost. Nodes communicate
collision-freely by always transmitting messages, consisting of
two parts: control message and data unit during their allocated
time slots. A control message is of xed length and serves multiple
purposes, e.g. it carries the address of its time slot controller,
indicates the distance of the associated node to the gateway,
addresses the intended receiver and reports the length of the data
unit. The timeout interval is kept short in order to ensure that the
sensor nodes do not waste precious energy through idle listening.
A notable shortcoming of LMAC is its usage of xed length frames,
where the length of the frames must have to be specied before
PMAC (Zheng et al., 2005) is a time slotted MAC protocol,

primarily designed to minimize energy waste from idle listening
which is common in some earlier protocols, e.g. S-MAC and TMAC. Many MAC protocols face the challenge of reducing idle
listening which is a major source of energy consumption. In
S-MAC, the sensor nodes wake up periodically to check if an
active transmission is in progress even if there is none. This
problem can be somewhat reduced by keeping a small duty cycle
but this in turn degrades the network throughput under heavy
trafc load. Similar case also happens in T-MAC in which the nodes
have to wake up at the beginning of each frame and remain awake
for at least the timeout period, even when there is no network
activity in the neighborhood.
PMAC attempts to overcome this drawback of earlier protocols
by allowing a sensor node to acquire knowledge about its
neighborhood before hand through a sleep/wake-up pattern. A
pattern for a sensor node is a string of bits which indicates its
tentative sleep/wake-up plan over several time slots and is also
adaptively changed according to the network trafc. The patterns
for all the nodes are generated through a robust mathematical
mechanism. For performing pattern exchange among the nodes,
time is divided into a number of Super Time Frames (STFs), where
each STF consists of two sub-frames: Pattern Repeat Time Frame
(PRTF) and Pattern Exchange Time Frame (PETF). The nodes repeat
their respective patterns during PRTF, whereas new patterns are
exchanged among the neighboring nodes during PETF. The number of time slots in PETF is set equal to the maximum possible
number of neighbors of a sensor node. This design of PMAC
requires some amount of time synchronization among the sensor
nodes, however it need not to be very strict.
The underlying mechanism of PMAC makes it to considerably
reduce energy consumption from idle listening by permitting the
sensor nodes, not involved in any network activity to remain
asleep. In order to further conserve energy, the timeout scheme of
T-MAC can also be additionally introduced. The empirical results
(Zheng et al., 2005) demonstrated that in comparison to S-MAC,
PMAC is able to achieve more power conservation under light
trafc loads and higher throughput under heavier trafc loads.
One drawback with PMAC is that it requires sleep/wake-up
patterns to be announced before hand which is often difcult
and not feasible in a practical sensor network application.
3.19. Zebra MAC (Z-MAC)
Z-MAC (Rhee et al., 2005) is a hybrid MAC protocol for WSNs
which combines both TDMA and CSMA in order to achieve high
channel utilization, improved medium contention, low latency and
collision avoidance at a low cost. It acts like CSMA or TDMA under
low and high contention levels, respectively. Z-MAC assigns time
slots to the sensor nodes at the time of deployment of nodes.
Although this scheme incurs high initial overhead, but it is
eventually compensated by enhanced throughput and energy
efciency. Unlike the traditional TDMA, a node may transmit
during any time slot after performing adequate carrier sensing.
14
The owners of a particular time slot always get higher priority in

accessing the channel than the non-owners. This regulation
effectively reduces the chances of collisions during data transmissions. By combining CSMA and TDMA, Z-MAC becomes more
preventive against some of the network hazards which include
timing failures, time wise variation in channel conditions, slot
assignment failures and topology changes.
Z-MAC starts with a preliminary setup phase in which the
following four operations are performed sequentially (Anastasi
et al., 2009; Rhee et al., 2005): neighbor discovery, slot assignment,
local frame exchange and global time synchronization. Each node
builds a list of its two-hop neighbors in the neighbor discovery
phase and then gets its respective time slot through a distributed
slot assignment algorithm. The assignment of slots to the nodes is
performed in a collision-free manner which ensures that no two
nodes in the two-hop neighborhood are allocated the same slot.
Then, in the local frame exchange phase, each node decides its
period of time, known as the time frame for which it can perform
network operations in the allocated time slot. The time frame of a
node in Z-MAC is selected locally to t its local neighborhood size
but avoiding any conicts with its contending neighbors. In the
global time synchronization step, the time frame and local slot
assignment of each node is forwarded to its two-hop neighbors.
Thus, all nodes achieve the slot and frame information about their
two-hop neighbors and accordingly synchronize to a common
reference time slot. After the setup phase, nodes access the
channel through the transmission control regulation, according to
which each node can be in one of the levels: Low Contention Level
(LCL) or High Contention Level (HCL). Usually a node is in LCL, except
when it receives an Explicit Contention Notication (ECN) message
from a two-hop neighbor within the last TECN period. These ECN
messages are sent by the sensor nodes which experience high
contention. In LCL, any node can contend for the channel, whereas
in HCL, only the owners of the current slot and their one-hop
neighbors are allowed for contention. Although, in both levels,
owners have higher priority than non-owners in accessing the
channel, but a non-owner can steal the slot when the slot does not
have a owner or when its owner have nothing to transmit. In this
way, high channel utilization is achieved even under low contention.
As specied in the outset, Z-MAC has many advantages over
traditional non-hybrid protocols, such as S-MAC in terms of channel
utilization, latency, throughput and energy efciency. The dynamic
adaptation to contention level is another salient feature of this
protocol. It has been observed that even in the worst case, Z-MAC
performs as good as the traditional CSMA (Rhee et al., 2005).
3.20. X-MAC
X-MAC (Buettner et al., 2006) is a low-power, energy efcient
MAC protocol which is specically designed for asynchronous
duty-cycled WSNs. Traditional MAC protocols for duty-cycled
sensor networks, such as B-MAC and WiseMAC adopt preamble
sampling with an extended length of the preamble. In spite of
many advantages, the use of long preamble length in low-power
listening suffers from increased per-hop latency, idle listening by
the senders and recipients and energy waste from overhearing by
the non-intended recipients. X-MAC aims to overcome these
drawbacks through employing a shortened preamble approach
yet retaining the salient features of low-power listening, e.g.
implementation simplicity, reduced power consumption and
decoupling of sender and transmitter sleep schedules. This protocol adopts a short strobed preamble which allows the target
receiver to interrupt the long preamble immediately after it wakes
up and nds that it is the target. Doing this saves a lot of time and
energy which are otherwise wasted in waiting for the entire long
preamble to complete. X-MAC also signicantly reduce per-hop
Fig. 16. The funneling effect in a sensor network.
latency and energy consumption by indicating the address of the

intended recipient in its short preamble, so that non-intended
recipients can quickly go back to sleep. Further, an adaptive
algorithm is suggested which dynamically adjusts the duty cycle
of the receivers in order to optimize per-packet latency or energy
consumption or both.
The empirical results (Buettner et al., 2006) demonstrated that
the shortened preamble approach of X-MAC indeed achieved
signicantly reduced energy consumption at the senders and
receivers end, reduced per-hop latency and increased throughput.
Moreover, X-MAC was found to be adaptable to various conditions
of network trafc.
3.21. Funneling-MAC
The funneling-MAC (Ahn et al., 2006) is a hybrid MAC protocol
which is specically designed to mitigate a unique undesirable
behavior of sensor networks, commonly known as the funneling
effect. In a static sensor network, packets coming from the sensor
nodes follow a many-to-one multi-hop path towards one or more
sink points and this travel pattern together with the centralized
data collection at a sink leads to dramatic congestion of packets
(choke point) near the intended sink node (Anastasi et al., 2009; Ahn
et al., 2006). This unique behavior of a sensor network is known as
the funneling effect and it has various adverse consequences on the
communication ow of the network. The funneling effect signicantly increases transit trafc intensity, delay in packets delivery,
congestion, occurrences of collision, loss of packets and energy
wastes when the packets move closer to the sink node. Moreover,
the funneling of packets leads to considerably limited application
delity at the sink nodes. A diagrammatic illustration of the
funneling effect, due to Ahn et al. (2006) is depicted in Fig. 16.
Alleviating the funneling effect is a major challenge for sensor
networks researchers and till now, various approaches have been
suggested for this purpose (Hull et al., 2004; Shrivastava et al.,
2004; Wan et al., 2005). However, most of these methods attempts
to control network trafc load and congestion at the aggregation
points or source nodes which is often very difcult. As such, Hull
et al. (2004) and Wan et al. (2005) have rightly pointed out that
none of these proposed techniques alone can fully alleviate the
problem of funneling. Some popular MAC protocols, such as
S-MAC, T-MAC, B-MAC, TRAMA and Z-MAC attempt to diminish
the funneling effect but only to limited extents.
The funneling-MAC (Ahn et al., 2006) is a localized, sinkoriented MAC protocol which is designed to explicitly recognize
as well as mitigate the funneling effect in a sensor network. It
adopts a hybrid mechanism which implements a CSMA/CA
throughout the network, whereas a localized TDMA in the funneling or high intensity region. In funneling-MAC, the tasks of
15
Table 1
A concise comparison of the studied MAC protocols.
Protocol
Category
Type
Comm.
pattern
Adaptability to
changes
Salient features
MACA, MACAW, IEEE 802.11
Contention
based
Contention
based
Contention
based
CSMA
All
Good
CSMA
All
Good
CSMA
All
Good
Simple to implement, energy efcient, resolve the problem of

hidden terminal
Uses two communication channels, energy efcient with increased
design cost
Highly energy efcient, loose time synchronization requirements
Schedule
based
Contention
based
Contention
based
Contention
based
Schedule
based
Hybrid
TDMA
All
Good
CSMA/np-CSMA
All
Good
CSMA/CA
All
Good
CSMA
All
Good
Easy to implement, exible, avoids collisions and highly energy

efcient
Employ preamble sampling to reduce duty cycle and idle listening
and also avoid collisions
Designed for event-driven sensor networks, achieves reasonably
low latency with large network size
Uses adaptive duty cycle and minimizes control packet overhead
TDMA
All
Good
Higher sleep times for nodes and less collisions
TDMA and CDMA
Very good
TDMA
Distributed
WSNs
All
TDMA
Convergecast Weak
TDMA
All
Moderate
TDMA and CSMA
All
Very good
Localized TDMA and All

CSMA/CA
Very good
Energy efcient, low cost, but prone to collisions and

synchronization problems
Forms clusters of sensor nodes which are managed by gateways to
save energy
Uses adaptive duty cycle to attain low latency and high energy
efciency
Uses a sleepwake pattern to primarily reduce energy wastes from
idle listening
Achieves low latency, high channel utilization and collision
avoidance at a considerably low cost.
Specically designed to mitigate the highly adverse funneling effect
in WSNs
PAMAS
S-MAC,
T-MAC,
DS-MAC
EMACs, LMAC
WiseMAC, B-MAC, X-MAC
Sift
Optimized MAC
TRAMA
SMACs
Energy Aware MAC
Z-MAC
Schedule
based
Schedule
based
Schedule
based
Hybrid
Funneling-MAC
Hybrid
D-MAC
PMAC
assessing and maintaining the depth of the intensity region as well

as TDMA scheduling of sensor events in that region are all
performed by the sink node only. The funneling-MAC assumes
that the sink node is apparently more energy rich and computationally efcient than the non-sink sensor nodes, although this
assumption may be atypical in some practical applications. In view
of the mentioned characteristics, it is evident that this MAC
protocol puts most of the network-related workloads on the sink
node and as such it can be viewed as a sink-oriented protocol. The
sink-oriented nature, together with the use of a localized TDMA in
the funneling region signicantly helps this MAC protocol to boost
application delity in the sensor network as well as to mitigate the
funneling effect and scalability problems. In a nutshell, the
funneling-MAC attempts to eliminate the funneling effect and
improve network performance through putting additional control
over the rst few hops of the network from the sink node (Ahn
et al., 2006).
The funneling-MAC is based on an effective hybrid mechanism
and benets from the region-wise implementations of CSMA/CA
and TDMA. The empirical results (Ahn et al., 2006) demonstrate
that this protocol is energy efcient, notably improves throughput,
controls packets losses, boosts delity in the sensor network and
signicantly outperforms the earlier B-MAC and Z-MAC protocols
in terms of eradicating the funneling effect under a wide variety of
trafc conditions. In the downside of this MAC protocol, there are
high implementation cost, putting excessive burdens on the sink
nodes and difculty in precisely identifying the zone of nodes
which should gain additional control.
4. Discussions and future research directions

In the previous section, a wide variety of MAC protocols for
WSNs are discussed together with their associated merits and
demerits. Among them, some protocols, such as MACA, MACAW,
Good
S-MAC, and T-MAC are described with more details than others.
This is because these protocols are highly important and motivated the development of many later MAC protocols. For example,
S-MAC can be regarded as a benchmark as it alone inspired several
other MAC protocols, e.g. T-MAC, DS-MAC, and optimized MAC.
Further, many authors often prefer to evaluate the performances of
their proposed MAC protocols against those of S-MAC. It should
also be noted that MAC protocols for WSNs is a very dynamic area
with nonstop contributions from many researchers. There is an
ongoing trend of developing new MAC protocols from different
novel perspectives and so the total count of the available MAC
protocols is increasing persistently. Considering these facts, the
preceding section carries out an intensive study of the various
important MAC protocols which are developed till now for WSNs;
but, the study is in no way exhaustive. This section is devoted to
provide a brief comparison of the MAC protocols which are
described so far and outline a number of future research directions
in this domain. All the discussed MAC protocols are concisely
presented, together with their salient characteristics in Table 1.
From Table 1, it can be seen that energy conservation is the
primary goal of all the MAC protocols which are proposed so far.
Conservation of energy is achieved through adopting various means
which include dual communication channels, preamble sampling,
adaptive duty cycle, clustering of sensor nodes and sleepwake
patterns. Furthermore, most of the developed MAC protocols support all types of communication patterns and are also quite good in
adapting to the changes in network topology and size. Another
important fact is that in spite of so many existing MAC protocols for
WSNs, none can be accepted as the absolute standard. The choice of
a MAC protocol is normally based on the nature of the sensor
network, specic performance goals and implementation cost. Now,
we isolate a number of open issues and research scopes which will
be helpful in designing future MAC protocols for WSNs.
The present MAC protocols are mostly based on either CSMA or
TDMA methods of medium utilization. Traditional CSMA methods
16
have the advantages of lower delay and increased throughput at

lower trafcs but they cannot adequately handle the event-driven
workloads which are very important in practical WSN applications. Also, CSMA lacks well-dened collision detection and
avoidance schemes. More research works are required to overcome these drawbacks of the traditional CSMA. One notable
approach in this direction is the CSMA/p* scheme (Tay et al.,
2004) which uses np-CSMA with the unique non-uniform probability distribution p* in order to minimize collisions between
contending stations. Contrary to CSMA, TDMA performs collisionfree medium access but it has other inherent limitations which
include degraded throughput and idle slots at low trafc, lack of
nodes synchronization and difculty to cope with topology
changes. Till now, only a few MAC protocols have been designed
which attempt to reduce the drawbacks of TDMA. For example,
EMACs and LMAC considerably enhance the performances of
TDMA by allowing the sensor nodes to choose their own time
slots locally without depending on a central manager or base
station. From the foregoing discussion, it is evident that a hybrid
MAC protocol which combines CSMA and TDMA can benet from
the merits of both the schemes while mitigating their drawbacks.
A few MAC protocols which adopt this hybridization approach are
proposed in literature but this topic surely needs further explorations (Demirkol et al., 2006). Apart from CSMA and TDMA, other
potential schemes such as CDMA and Frequency Division Multiple
Access (FDMA) which received least attentions so far in MAC
protocols designing should also be considered. Performance evaluation of different medium access mechanisms in a common
framework is another major issue which is missing in the present
works.
Inter-protocol combination may be a new research direction in
which the methodologies of two or more MAC protocols can be
effectively combined, unless any conict occurs. Although, this
practice may be a little costly at times but it can substantially
improve the network operations as well as diminish various
power-related constraints of the sensor nodes. For example, the
concepts of adaptive preamble sampling of B-MAC and distributed
communication of SMACs may be combined to design a new MAC
protocol which is apparently collision-free, requires less duty
cycle, highly energy efcient and easily adaptable to network
topology changes.
Most of the available MAC protocols are designed with the
primary goal of minimizing energy waste which of course is a
crucial challenge for WSN applications. However, there are some
other important issues to be considered as well which include
network security, mobility of nodes, reliability of packets delivery
and protocol evaluation on real sensor platforms (Yadav et al.,
2009). Sensor networks are prone to a number of malicious
attacks, such as eavesdropping, node capturing, physical tempering and denial of service. Protecting against such type of attacks is
quite challenging, mainly because the security techniques of
traditional networks cannot be directly applied to sensor network
systems (Karlof et al., 2004). In spite of the paramount importance
of maintaining sensor network security, only limited research has
been carried out in this regard. The rst fully implemented link
layer security architecture, viz. TinySec has been proposed by
Karlof et al. (Perrig et al., 2004) only a few years ago. Evidently
more in depth works are required in order to develop advanced
sensor networks security mechanisms.
Mobility of sensor nodes is a very useful concept in which
increasing research interests have been observed in recent years.
Traditional static sensor networks often suffer from severe energy
consumption problems, such as the funnelling effect. Introducing
mobility to some (if not all) sensor nodes can make the WSN
signicantly energy efcient and suitable for various practical
dynamic scenarios (Yadav et al., 2009; Anastasi et al., 2009).
However, this domain is in its initial phase and many related

aspects have to be carefully studied. There are excellent future
scopes for designing energy-efcient mobility-supported MAC
protocols for WSNs within the range of affordable costs. Reliable
delivery of packets in practical sensor network applications is
another promising area which has to be extensively explored in
future works. Moreover, the MAC protocols should be tested on
real WSN platforms, rather than using only simulated architectures. This will provide a fair idea of the performances of a
proposed protocol in real life scenarios (Yadav et al., 2009).
Integration of MAC with other routing layers has several
benets and as such it is an intriguing area, but has limited
research attention so far. Integrating different layers increases
cross-layer interaction which in turn enhances energy saving
through minimizing layer-wise packet overheads and also allows
more efcient operation of the sensor network (Demirkol et al.,
2006). Relying upon only a single layer can misinform about the
overall performance of the sensor network which can adversely
affect the evaluation of a proposed MAC protocol for the network.
Although, there are some recognized works (Cui et al., 2005; Zorzi,
2004; Ding et al., 2003) aiming to integrate MAC with other layers
but more intensive research has to be carried out in future.
5. Conclusions
Wireless sensor networks comprise an emerging technology
which has found overwhelming applications in a wide range of
practical communication scenarios during the last decade. A
typical WSN is composed of several battery-operated, usually
static sensor nodes which are constrained in energy supply,
bandwidth, storage capacity and processing ability. The primary
objective of a MAC protocol is to enable smooth operation of the
associated WSN and prevent energy consumption from all potential sources. Although, the domain of MAC protocols is relatively
new, it is rapidly enriching in both quality and quantity through
active contributions from research community.
In this paper, at rst the designing challenges of MAC protocols
for WSNs are discussed and then a wide variety of existing MAC
protocols are meticulously studied, highlighting their inherent
merits and demerits. In order to provide an up-to-date survey,
several recently developed MAC protocols, e.g. PMAC, X-MAC, ZMAC are described together with the earlier well recognized
protocols, e.g. MACA, MACAW, IEEE 802.11, S-MAC. The important
ndings of the present study are summarized as follows. First, it is
observed that in spite of their abundance in literature, the choice
of a MAC protocol for a particular WSN application is not
straightforward and is normally problem-dependent. Also, none
of the designed MAC protocol can be selected as the standard one
for all sensor networking scenarios. Second, although, energyefciency is the fundamental objective, a MAC protocol can seldom
prevent energy wastes from all potential sources. Third, some
protocols, e.g. MACA, S-MAC, T-MAC have signicantly inspired the
designs of various other MAC protocols. The penultimate section of
this paper concisely compares all the studied MAC protocols and
discusses some important future research directions in this
domain. Although, the present study is quite intensive, but is of
course not exhaustive. This paper includes several important MAC
protocols, designed so far in sensor networking literature, but not
all. The counts of available MAC protocols are continuously
increasing and as such time-to-time surveys are very important.
Hopefully, the present study will be signicantly helpful in understanding the current research trend in designing MAC protocols
for WSNs.
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Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Network and Computer Applications

A meticulous study of various medium access control protocols

E-mail address: adhikari.ratan@gmail.com

R. Adhikari / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()

Eyes MAC (EMACs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

among the heavily populated low capacity sensor nodes (Demirkol

R. Adhikari / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()

WSNs, emphasizing their relative strengths and weaknesses.

2. Design and implementation issues of MAC

 Collision: When a receiver node receives more than one packet

2.2. Properties of a good MAC protocol

 Bitwise energy consumption: It is dened as the ratio of the total

energy consumed by a sensor node and the total number of bits

These four metrics are very useful in assessing the performance

3. Various developed MAC protocols for WSN

R. Adhikari / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()

Fig. 2. Classication of MAC protocols for wireless sensor network.

(ii) deployment of sensor nodes, (iii) node capabilities, (iv) energy

Fig. 3. Three communicating nodes in a network conguration.

contention based protocols are mostly based on the Carrier Sense

R. Adhikari / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()

Fig. 4. Communication pattern of the MACAW protocol.

signicant idle listening (Stemm and Katz, 1997). On the other

occurs when B is transmitting to A while C attempts to transmit.

R. Adhikari / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()

in some situations. Although, the RRTS packet is introduced as a

3.3. IEEE 802.11

Fig. 6. The communication mechanism in S-MAC.

The IEEE 802.11 is a familiar contention based MAC protocol

3.4. Power aware multi-access signaling (PAMAS)

based on it. It provides considerably more effective collision

PAMAS (Singh and Raghavendra, 1998) is one of the earliest

R. Adhikari / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()

3.5. Sensor MAC (S-MAC)

immediately updates its NAV by the duration eld in the packet. In

R. Adhikari / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()

different schedules, then a lot of energy is consumed from idle

Fig. 9. A basic data exchange operation in the T-MAC protocol.

Fig. 11. Depiction of a solution to the early sleeping problem in T-MAC.

As stated earlier, one major drawback of S-MAC is the constant

R. Adhikari / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()

saturated and messages are transmitted at maximum rate. A node

where C and R are respectively the lengths of the contention

3.6.5. Advantages of T-MAC

R. Adhikari / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()

Fig. 12. Duty cycle doubling in DS-MAC.

Fig. 13. Time slot division in EMACs.

but this communication is not guaranteed to be collision-free.

Fig. 14. Concept of the WiseMAC protocol.

measure, WiseMAC attempts to dynamically determine this

R. Adhikari / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()

picked by a node. Rather, it keeps a xed size of the contention

3.12. Trafc adaptive medium access protocol (TRAMA)

R. Adhikari / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()

3.14. Energy aware TDMA based MAC

3.15. Berkeley media access control (B-MAC)

R. Adhikari / Journal of Network and Computer Applications ()

nodes deployment which is often difcult and may not be

Fig. 15. Data gathering tree in D-MAC implementation.

In order to mitigate the problems of channel contention and

3.16.1. Advantages of D-MAC

Collision: When a receiver node receives more than one packet

Bitwise energy consumption: It is dened as the ratio of the total