An Adaptive Contention Window-Based MAC Protocol for Mobile Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency, reliability, routing, and channel access control are the most significant expected objectives of researches established in Mobile Sensor Networks (MSNs). Compared to the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) issues, MSNs suffers from the dynamic sensor density aspect that impacts the Medium Access Control (MAC) operation due to the collision rate increase and resource allocation inadequacy. In this paper, we are interested to design an adaptive MAC algorithm (named AT-MAC) that allows mobile nodes to share the same Access Point (AP) with low collision rate and provide high performance especially in dynamic topology and variable traffic load scenarios. This algorithm considers the number of associated sensor nodes in a certain contention area to adjust dynamically the MAC management profile for more requirement-resource adequacy. AT-MAC provides 20% and 37.4% of received packets higher than Timeout-MAC (T-MAC) and Sensor-MAC (S-MAC), respectively. It also achieves a significant throughput to energy ratio.