MC-LMAC: A Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In traditional wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, energy efficiency is considered to be the most important concern whereas utilizing the use of bandwidth and maximizing the throughput are of secondary importance. However, recent applications, such as structural health monitoring, require high amounts of data to be collected at a faster rate. We present a multi-channel MAC protocol, MC-LMAC, designed with the objective of maximizing the throughput of WSN by coordinating transmissions over multiple channels. MC-LMAC takes the advantage of interference and contention free parallel transmissions on different channels. It is based on scheduled access which eases the coordination of nodes dynamically switching their interfaces between channels and makes the protocol to operate effectively free of collisions during peak traffic. Time is organized into timeslots and each node shall be assigned control over a timeslot to transmit on a particular channel. We analyze the performance of MC-LMAC with extensive simulations. MC-LMAC exhibits significant bandwidth utilization and high throughput while ensuring an energy-efficient operation. Moreover, MC-LMAC outperforms the contention-based multi-channel MMSN protocol, cluster based channel assignment and single-channel CSMA in terms of data delivery ratio and throughput for high data rate, moderate-size networks of 100 nodes.