Patent ID: 8194695

Claim:
A communication method for a terminal in a wireless sensor network using a contention-based channel access mechanism, comprising: initializing a contention window to a known size, when a packet transmission is required; counting a number of resets of the contention window; resetting the size of the contention window in a hybrid expansion mode including increasing the size of the contention window one of linearly and exponentially when a parameter indicates linear expansion or exponential expansion, respectively, when a channel is assessed to be busy; and attempting the packet transmission through the channel, when the channel is assessed to be idle, wherein increasing the size of the contention window linearly comprises calculating a new size of the contention window as: CW i =CW i-1 =c , mod( i,n )≠0( i ≧1) wherein i is the number of resets, CW i is the size of the contention window, CW i-1 is a previous size of the contention window, c is a linear expansion constant, and n is a number of expansion resets in which the size of contention window is expanded.