Comparison of CSMA based MAC protocols of wireless sensor networks

Energy conservation has been an important area of interest in Wireless Sensor networks (WSNs). Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols play an important role in energy conservation. In this paper, we describe CSMA based MAC protocols for WSN and analyze the simulation results of these protocols. We implemented S-MAC, T-MAC, B-MAC, B-MAC+, X-MAC, DMAC and Wise-MAC in TOSSIM, a simulator which unlike other simulators simulates the same code running on real hardware. Previous surveys mainly focused on the classification of MAC protocols according to the techniques being used or problem dealt with and presented a theoretical evaluation of protocols. This paper presents the comparative study of CSMA based protocols for WSNs, showing which MAC protocol is suitable in a particular environment and supports the arguments with the simulation results. The comparative study can be used to find the best suited MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks in different environments.