SCF-MAC Protocol: A selective node’s-waking up, collision-alleviating, fault- tolerant medium access protocol for Linear Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Abstract Linear sensor network is becoming an interesting area of research due to its distinctive characteristic of linearity. Also, when it comes to monitoring and surveillance task, LSNs are of great importance. However, the battery constraint nature of sensor network act as a limiting factor, thus making energy efficiency an essential requirement for designing LSNs. In context of the seven-layer approach, Mac layer is considered to be the most essential layer for energy conservation. In this paper, we have proposed a Mac protocol specifically for LSN which is divided into homogeneous grades having sink node at one end only. It is a synchronous duty-cycled protocol utilizing pipeline forwarding or staggered scheduling along with a fault tolerance mechanism to overcome load balancing issues. Extensive discrete time simulations have been performed which shows that SCF MAC have remarkably performed better than the previous state of art models in terms of throughput, packet drop probability, energy consumption.