A Novel Multi-channel MAC Protocol for Cluster Based Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

A light weight, scalable and collision free MAC protocol, DTFMM, is presented in this paper, which combines frequency and time division principles for medium sharing. Based on clustered network topology, the protocol employs a distributed local coordinate algorithm for assigning channels among clusters to enable simultaneous non-interfering data collection. Intra-cluster transmissions are scheduled by cluster head (CH) based on time slot. CHs aggregate the gathered data and forward it over inter-CH paths to the base-station based on minimum spanning tree routing. Simulation demonstrated superiority of DTFMM in terms of convergent rate, throughput and delay performance when compared with well-known protocol MMSN.