Mobility Impact on Cluster Based MAC Layer Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enable a wide variety of applications resulting in still increasing requirements for the protocols supporting the operations. The medium access control (MAC) layer protocols are essential for improving the performance of an application and its quality of service because MAC protocols influence channel capacity utilization, network delay, energy consumption, and scalability. The contribution of this paper is two novel cluster-based time division multiple access (TDMA) scheduling MACs for WSNs and an analysis of the mobility impact on both. The proposed MAC layer protocols support real time applications where the cluster-based scheduling improves the scalability and also improves the performance in varying network conditions. The paper presents the design, implementation and performance evaluation of the proposed cluster based TDMA scheduling algorithms green conflict free (GCF) and multicolor-GCF (M-GCF) for high complexity and high requirement applications of WSNs under both low and high mobility conditions. The comparative evaluation shows that the M-GCF algorithm has better slot sharing and less conflicts with reduced communication energy consumption, delay, and good throughput under static and low mobility conditions while the GCF algorithm has better performance in high mobility scenarios. The paper also defines the mobility threshold that decides the use of the GCF- and M-GCF algorithms according to the mobility requirement of application.
mobility clustering wireless sensor networks (wsn) time division multiple access (tdma) gcf m-gcf media access control (mac) graph coloring energy efficiency