A Cluster-based Hybrid Access Protocol for Wireless
Sensor Networks
Min Zhang, Alireza Babaei and Prathima Agrawal
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Auburn University
200 Broun Hall, Auburn AL, USA 36849
Abstract— Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are deployed for a
wide range of applications that involve collecting information
from the operational region in which they inhabit. Depending on
the application, sensor nodes may have to transport a time-
varying load of sensing data. However, medium access protocols
used in WSNs are not generally designed to deal with time
varying traffic and may be efficient only for one particular range
of traffic load. In this work, assuming a clustering routing
scheme, the objective is to improve the performance of wireless
sensor networks using a hybrid access protocol. The main idea is
to use a protocol which incorporates the characteristics of both
random (e.g., CSMA) and contention-free (e.g., TDMA) medium
access schemes and smoothly switches between the two
depending on the level of traffic load of the sensor nodes. TDMA
is used when the network is subject to high traffic or contention
and CSMA is used during the clusters’ setup phase as well as low
contention scenarios. The NS-2 simulations results show that our
scheme, compared to TDMA stand-alone, improves the
throughput and reduces the latency in variable traffic scenarios.
Keywords— Wireless Sensor Network, Routing Protocol, Hybrid
MAC Protocol, TDMA, CSMA.
I. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION
WSNs consist of a large number of tiny densely distributed
small sensor nodes which are deployed in an ad hoc manner.
The sensor nodes are used to sense and transmit some specific
physical characteristics of the environment to a sink node [1].
Typically there are four components in a sensor network: (a) a
group of distributed sensor nodes equipped with small
microprocessor, radio communication module, and a limited
energy source; (b) an interconnection network; (c) a central
point (Sink/Base Station) for information gathering; and (d) a
set of computing resources at the sink or beyond it to handle
data correlation, status querying, event trending, and data
mining [2]. Fig. 1 shows a typical sensor network structure.
The communications in wireless networks, unlike in wired
networks, is achieved in the form of electromagnetic signal
transmission through the air. This common transmission
medium must therefore be shared by all sensor nodes in a fair
manner. To achieve this goal, a medium access control
protocol is the major determining factor in WSN performance.
A number of access control protocols have been proposed for
WSNs [3-4].
978-1-4673-1466-4/12/$31.00©2012 Crown
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Figure 1: A typical wireless sensor network structure
There are mainly two kinds of MAC protocols, random
access and scheduling based access. CSMA and TDMA are
the typical representatives for them respectively. Scheduling
based access protocols can generally provide good energy
efficiency but less flexibility to the changes in node density or
traffic load. Due to its simplicity, flexibility, and robustness,
CSMA is a well-adopted access protocol in wireless networks.
However, being a random access method, when more than
two conflicting nodes transmit at the same time, the signal
fidelity degrades significantly. Furthermore, CSMA is
susceptible to the hidden terminal problem. It may cause
serious throughput degradation particularly in high-data-rate
scenarios. Although RTS/CTS can alleviate the hidden
terminal problem, it incurs a large overhead [5].
WSNs are application specific with varying traffic load
according to the specific implementations. On the other hand,
the need for network to reach high performance should be
independent from time. Thus, a stand-alone MAC scheme for
each application is not practical. Combining the features of
these protocols to offset their weaknesses could be an efficient
way for MAC design.
In the following section, the idea of hybrid MAC protocol
will be proposed to improve the performance of a sensor
network under varying traffic conditions [6].
II. PROTOCOL DESIGN
In WSNs, the transmission medium is shared by all nodes
within each others’ transmission range, and because of limited
amount of energy and scarcity of the medium spectrum,
choosing appropriate network architecture for routing is
deemed to be an important step for sensor networks. Using the
results in [7], the transmission energy for transmitting a k -bit
message to a distance d receiver can be computed as:
 ETx (k , d ) = ETx −elec (k ) + ETx− amp (k , d )=Eelec * k + ε * k * d α (1)
where ETX −elec is the transmission electronics energy
consumption, ETx − amp is the transmit amplifier energy
consumption, ε is a constant coefficient and α is the path
loss exponent which equals to 2 in the free space propagation
model. Compared to direct transmission between source nodes
and destination sink, using intermediate nodes for relaying
should be more efficient in WSNs.
As in [8], there are two common network architectures
adopted in WSNs, multi-hop and hierarchical (i.e. clustering).
To enable the system to cope with dynamic load and cover a
large area of interest without service degradation, cluster-
based routing protocols are shown to be more efficient [9],
[10]. In this paper, we consider LEACH-C [7], which is a
well-known centralized clustering based protocol, and
consider its performance as a baseline for comparison with
our proposed protocol.
System Model
We propose a cluster-based MAC protocol that takes
advantage of the mechanisms of both CSMA and TDMA
protocols. The following assumptions are made in the
Figure 3: Flow-graph of State Transitions
architecture of the network:
1. All nodes are homogenous, i.e. they begin with the same
power, computation and communication capability.
2. The nodes in the network are aware of information about
themselves, like the node IDs, locations and energy levels.
3. Nodes are stationary.
4. The Sink node has unlimited resource;
5. The number of transmitting nodes is varying, which is
used to simulate the dynamic traffic load.
In this work, our aim is to find a balance between random
and scheduling access protocols. As in a typical cluster-based
architecture, the sensor nodes in the network are divided into
clusters with one cluster-head (CH) in each cell, and these Figure 4: Protocol Scheme in the Network
cluster-heads form the backbone of the sensor network. All
nodes in one cluster only send data to their own cluster-head. A. Cluster Establishment Procedure
Similar to LEACH [7], CDMA is used for the communication a. Information Advertisement
between CHs and Sink to reduce the interference between the
At the beginning of the procedure, all alive nodes send the
clusters, while the hybrid MAC protocol is used for intra-
information about themselves, such as their locations and
cluster communications.
energy levels to the Sink node in one hop at a specific time,
The operation of the protocol is broken into rounds. For
which equals to id * TInfo −adv , where id is the node identification
each round, it begins with a set-up phase, when the clusters
are formed. Then, it is followed by a steady state phase, when number, and TInfo −adv is a parameter set as
data is collected by the cluster-heads and transmitted to the L +l
sink. The time-line of such operation is depicted in Figure 2. TInfo− adv = hdr int erval *8 . (2)
Bw
Lhdr is the length of the header in bytes in each packet, lint erval is
a constant coefficient to represent an interval, and Bw is the
Figure 2: Time-line of protocol operation channel bandwidth. All the default values for the parameters
The following flow chart in Figure 3, describes the will be given in the Table 1 in the Appendix. They will then
operation of the proposed protocol in this paper. A detailed go to sleep mode for power saving and wait for the
explanation is given bellow, and Figure 4 shows the main information from the Sink node.
protocol scheme of the network. In this step, a simple TDMA protocol is used based on our
assumption that all nodes know the information. Furthermore,
there is a timer for each state for avoiding overlap. A timer

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with duration of Tend _ adv = N *TInfo− adv is set, where N is the total
number of nodes in the network except the sink node. When it
times out, the nodes wake up to receive the information from
the Sink node.
b. Cluster-Head Election
As the relay node in each cluster, the cluster-head needs to
perform functions like collecting data from the sensor nodes
in its cluster, aggregating the data, and sending the
compressed information to the Sink node. So compared with
other sensor nodes, it will deplete its energy rather quickly.
Choosing an optimal set of cluster-heads from the nodes in the
sensor network is a NP-Hard problem. In [11], an
approximation algorithm based on the simulated annealing
approach was proposed to approach the optimal solution to the
cluster-head selection problem. In this paper, we set the
number of clusters to be 5 and the total number of nodes to be
100 in our simulation which are the same parameters chosen
in [7] and [12].
Once the optimal cluster-heads are selected and their
associated cluster members are determined, the Sink node
broadcasts this information containing the cluster-heads’ IDs
back to each node in the network.
B. TDMA Time Slot Assignment and Hybrid Protocol
Procedure
a. Cluster Setup and Time Slot Assignment
Remaining in the sleep mode for a duration of Tend _ adv after
sending the information, all nodes wake up to receive the
information from the Sink node to determine their own roles
in the current round. If a node’s cluster-head ID is the same as
its own ID, then this node will get the cluster-head role in its
cluster, otherwise, the node needs to determine the cluster-
head it is associated with. At the same time, a node’s TDMA
slot for data transmission is determined by the Sink, and then
it goes to sleep until it senses some events happening. At this
point, the operation for set-up phase is over, next step will be
the steady state phase. Here, the time frame for the cluster-
head and the structure of a time slot needs to be specified
before we continue to discuss the procedure. They are shown
as Figure 5 and 6.
Figure 5: Time Frame for the cluster-head
Figure 6: Structure of Time Slot for Transmitting Nodes
The number of time slots in the frame is determined by the
number of sensor nodes in the cluster. After one frame is
fulfilled with the data from sensor nodes, cluster-head
performs the data aggregation process. Using a dedicated
CDMA code, data is delivered to the sink node. Also, each
sensor node is called the owner of a slot if the current slot is
its own. The other sensors will be nonowners of that same slot.
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These concepts are important for the hybrid access protocol
described in the next section.
b. Data Collection
Figure 7 depicts one particular situation at the end of Set-
Up phase. There are totally 100 sensor nodes in the simulation
scenario, and they are divided into 5 areas. The sensor nodes
in rectangles are the elected cluster-heads by the sink node.
Once the clusters are set up and all nodes get their own
TDMA slots, the data collection begins. In this Section, we
will use a probabilistic approach to simulate the events. The
details about the operation of the hybrid access protocol will
be introduced below.
Figure 7: Network scheme at the end of Set-Up phase
In our simulations, we use a series of different numbers of
sending nodes to model the varying traffic scenarios. There
are totally 100 sensor nodes in the network, which consists of
5 cluster-heads and 95 regular sensor nodes. In the simulation,
the number of sending nodes is varied from 10 to 100
increasing by a step of 5 which result in 19 sets of records.
Now, we assume that k ≤ N nodes will sense the events
from the environment and transmit information in the current
round with a probability. Let us define a threshold,
Pth (k ) = k / N , where N is the total number of nodes in the
network. Each node chooses a random number uniformly
distributed between 0 and 1. If the number is less than or
equal to the threshold Pth (k ) , it will send one packet in its own
time slot by using a random back-off time uniformly selected
within the To period as shown in Figure 6.
We assume that a node still has data to send after sending a
packet. If the original LEACH-C is adopted, it has to wait till
its own slots in the following frames; however, k is less than
N, which means there are still many other slots not being used.
The channel is therefore wasted and also long latency will be
incurred, especially under low traffic level. Now, we will
introduce how our proposed hybrid access protocol works to
cope with this drawback.
In our approach, we again use a probability
threshold, Prth = e / k , where e is a constant. Here, we set it to
be 3 to get a low traffic condition. Then, the random number
pick and comparison is done once more. Besides transmitting
at their own slots, some of the nodes can also use slots
belonging to other nodes, but with a low priority.
 As illustrated in Figure 6, there is a time period called Tno III. SIMULATION AND RESULTS
following To which is for the non-owners of the slot. Every This section examines the performance of the proposed
non-owner of this slot has to wait a period of To for the protocol using NS2.34 under Linux Operating System. In this
simulation, we assume the network is in a 100 x 100 square
owners’ transmissions. After that, and making sure that the area, all sensor nodes are uniformly and randomly deployed in
channel is idle, it picks a random back-off uniformly within Tno . it, with the sink node at the origin. All the default values of
During this time duration, it competes for access to the the parameters used in the simulations will be given in the
channel with other non-owners using CSMA. Therefore table in the Appendix. The following results will show the
additional idle time slots can be used, and channel resource performance comparisons between LEACH-C and the
waste will be reduced. As the number of sending nodes proposed protocol from several points of view to verify the
increases, more contention will be incurred. As a result, it will improvement by using the latter one.
be more unlikely for non-owners to get the channel access
because of the higher priority of the owner. Thus, the access
control scheme will act more like TDMA.
In Section IV, the performance of LEACH-C will be
compared with the proposed approach using NS2 simulations.
C. Data Transmission between Cluster-Heads and Sink
In wireless sensor networks, once an event happens, the
nodes within the event’s range will sense this change, and
generate data. Due to the dense deployment in sensor
networks, it is likely that data generated from neighbouring
sensors is redundant and highly correlated. So a specific
process called data aggregation or data compression is needed
in such networks [13] to extract the most critical information Figure 8: Average System Throughput
with less data latency. Data aggregation is usually done by the
intermediate nodes; in our model the cluster-heads are
responsible for this process.
The data aggregation used in LEACH [7] is called
beamforming [14]. Beamforming combines the signals from
multiple sensors as follows:
N L
y[n] = ¦¦ wi [l ]si [n − l ] (3)
i =1 l =1

where si [n] is the signal form the i th sensor, wi [n] is the

weighting filter for the i th signal, N is the total number of data
source sensor nodes, and L is the number of taps in the filter.
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, once a cluster- Figure 9: Average Throughput per Sending Node
head collects a full frame of data, it extracts the useful
information by using the beamforming algorithm. Then, it
transmits the fused information to the sink node directly.
Since, the numbers of sensor nodes in the clusters are different;
it is hard for them to keep synchronization. Their transmission
times can therefore be distinct. To prevent the clusters from
inter-clusters interference, it is more convenient and also
practical to use CDMA to cope with the transmission between
cluster-heads and sink node.
All of the nodes check themselves as being alive or not at
the beginning of the next round. If the energy is sufficient,
then the procedures above will repeat. By using such periodic
states, the energy can be evenly consumed by all of the nodes
in the network and can prevent some specific nodes from Figure 10: Average Time spent for transmitting one Packet
draining their battery quickly. We measure the performance of the WSN in terms of
throughput and latency. Throughput is defined as the number
of packets transmitted in the channel in a given time duration;
data latency can be defined as how much time it takes for a
packet of data to get through the network. Here, as shown in

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 Figure 8 and 9, the average system throughputs and per node
throughput are presented. Figure 10 indicates the average time
taken for transmitting a packet.
LEACH-C uses TDMA protocol for intra-cluster
communication, and although it avoids unnecessary collisions
within the cluster, it also incurs long data latency. This is
because a node can only send one packet in each time frame,
and it will wait till the next frame to send additional packets.
In the proposed protocol, however, a node can transmit during
any time. From Figure 8 and 9, we can see the advantage,
where both the average throughputs of system and per sending
node throughput have improved compared to LEACH-C.
For WSNs, being application-specific networks, data
latency is important in many applications and the freshness of
data is a significant factor. As shown in Figure 10, the time to
transmit a packet is much lower in our proposed protocol
compared to LEACH-C.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this work, a hybrid access protocol combining
advantages of CSMA and TDMA and based on a clustering
scheme is proposed for wireless sensor networks. By
comparing the performance of LEAHC-C and the proposed
protocol using the simulation results from Section IV, it is
verified that the proposed protocol can have better
performance factors, including higher throughput and lower
data latency, which are important criteria to measure the
performance of WSNs. Also, as expected, the proposed
protocol can dynamically switch the behaviour of MAC
between CSMA and TDMA according to the level of
contention in the network.
[6] M. Zhang, SCL: A Cross-Layer Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks,
MS thesis, Auburn University, Dec. 2011.
[7] W. B. Heinzelman, “Application-Specific Protocol for Wireless
Networks,” PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, 2000.
[8] I. F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, E. Cayirci, “Wireless
sensor networks: a survey,” Computer Networks, vol. 38, no., pp. 393-422,
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networks,” Ad Hoc Networks, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 325-349, 2005.
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sensor networks,” Computer Communications, vol. 30, no. 14-15, pp.
2826-2841, 2007.
[11] T. Murata, H. Ishibuchi. “Performance Evaluation of Genetic Algorithms
for Flowshop Scheduling Problems.” Proceedings of the 1st IEEE
Conference on Evolutionary Computation, vol. 2, pp. 812-817, June 1994.
[12] Haiming Yang, B. Sikdar, “Optimal Cluster Head Selection in the LEACH
Architecture,” Performance, Computing and Communication Conference,
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networks: a survey,” IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, vol. 8,
no. 4, pp. 48-63, 2006.
[14] K. Yao, R. Hudson, C. Reed, D. Chen, F. Lorenzelli, “Blind Beamforming
on a Randomly Distributed Sensor Array System,” Proceedings of the
1998 IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems, October 1998.

APPENDIX
NS-2 Simulation Parameters Default
Header Size 25 Byte
Data Payload Size 500 Byte
Contention Window Size for Owner ( To ) 8
Contention Window Size for Non-owner ( Tno ) 32
Beamforming Energy 5e-9 J/bit
Energy for Radio Circuitry 50e-9 J/bit
Initial Energy 2J
Channel Bandwidth 1 Mbps
Total Number of Sensor Nodes 100
Table 1: Default Settings of System Parameters

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