Evaluation And Comparison Of Mac Protocols In Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network applications call for different kinds of network protocols at different levels of the network stack based on application requirements. A number of medium access control (MAC) protocols have been proposed in the literature. Evaluation of most of these MAC protocols have typically been based on simulation, and while such simulation provides interesting insight into the behavior of these protocols, artifacts caused by behavior of hardware is ignored. Further more, MAC protocols are usually evaluated by comparing the new protocol with others based on one or two metrics, the ones that determined the design decisions for the protocol under evaluation. In this thesis, we present a comprehensive evaluation of MAC protocols based on a set of common metrics. The evaluation is conducted by way of experiments on a test bed of real sensor hardware for different scenarios and work loads that would match different application requirements.