Review and Analysis of Energy Efficient MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensors are the tiny devices which are able to connect to the physical world and can gather information or control a physical parameter in the field. To do these controlling and monitoring tasks sensors works together by forming a wireless network called as wireless sensor network (WSN). WSN work efficiently, if there are efficient routing and Media Access Control (MAC) protocols available. Energy efficiency is required because the sensors mostly operate on a small battery without any external power supply. As MAC layer has control over the communication between sensor nodes in the network, there is requirement of energy efficient MAC protocols. MAC protocol design for WSN is a challenging task because of the resource constraints and limited capabilities in sensor nodes. In literature many energy efficient MAC protocols has been proposed for WSN. This paper presents the classification and comparative analysis of energy efficient MAC protocols for WSN. Also, the characteristics of a good MAC protocol has been discussed with performance metrics for MAC in WSN