A Reliable MAC for Energy-Efficient WSNs in the Era of IoT

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are gaining in importance with an increasing need for interconnectivity in the advent of Internet of Things. In some application scenarios, such as building and home automation, WSNs need to comply with deadlines and guarantee a reliable communication, for which a suitable MAC (Medium Access Control) is of paramount importance. However, existing approaches from the literature are either unable to provide such guarantees (e.g., CSMA) or they incur too much energy consumption (e.g., TDMA). To overcome this problem, we propose a MAC technique that guarantees reliability requirements while fulfilling a maximum delay constraint or deadline. We perform a large set of experiments based on detailed simulations with OMNeT++ showing that our technique is energy-efficient and significantly outperforms standard MAC approaches such as CSMA and TDMA.