Fuzzy Based Mac Adaptation In Industrial Iot Based Sensor Networks

The last decade has seen a significant interest in the deployment of industrial wireless sensor network. Most of these networks are deployed to operate for several years. As more and more field devices get retrofitted with wireless connectivity, the network may get congested with time. As the commissioned network is not designed to handle a large number of additional devices, the network may suffer with degraded performance. An industrial field device will have to compete to get a reliable access of the medium. In this paper we investigate a fuzzy based mechanism that allows the sensor network components to autonomously adapt the priority of accessing the medium in order to reduce the unwanted collision in the network. The proposed fuzzy based adaption algorithm is applied at the medium access control (MAC) layer of an IEEE 802.15.4 based sensor network. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism results in an improved throughput and lower packet drop rate when compared to the default channel access mechanism. The proposed method can work autonomously in every node and will reduce the performance degradation as the network density increases over time.