Designing an asynchronous multi-channel media access control protocol based on service quality for wireless sensor networks

Recent developments in the field of telecommunication have provided the ability to design and manufacture wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with low power consumption, small size and affordable prices. The structure of these networks is such that sensor nodes are placed in inaccessible places, because of that it is almost impossible to charge or replace their batteries. Due to the limited resources of these nodes, the main challenge in these networks is to manage energy consumption and increase their lifetime. Media access control protocols (MACs) are introduced in the lower layer of the network, and their main function is to provide access to a common media in order to avoid collisions between different nodes. In this paper, an asynchronous multi-channel media access control protocol was introduced to configure the sleep and wake-up time of the nodes as well as set the meeting of the nodes in order to exchange data. This protocol makes it possible to use multiple channels for sending and receiving frames without creating synchronization overhead. And as a result, it reduces energy consumption and increases packet delivery rates on the network. The evaluation results of the proposed protocol show that the proposed method works better in energy consumption, operational power, delay and the ratio of packets to the destination, package rate and send multiple data steps compared to other MAC-based methods.