An interference-aware multichannel media access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Scalable Parallel Systems (SPS) have offered a challenging model of computing and poses fascinating optimizations in sensor networks. With the development of sensor hardware technology, a certain sensor node is equipped with a radio transceiver that can be tuned to work on multiple channels. In this paper, we develop a novel interference-aware multichannel media access control (IMMAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks, which takes advantage of multichannel availability. Firstly, each node is assigned with a quiescent channel to reduce hidden terminal beforehand, and then it makes channel adjustment according to dynamic traffic. Secondly, a scalable multichannel media access control protocol is designed to make a tradeoff between channel switching overhead and fairness, and it effectively supports for node unicast and broadcast based on the receiver-directed channel switching. We have implemented simulation to evaluate the performance of IMMAC by comparing with other relevant protocols. The results show that our protocol exhibits more prominent ability, which utilizes multichannel to make parallel transmission and reduce hidden terminal problems effectively in resource-constrained wireless sensor networks.