The Multi-Channel Flow-Aware Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

We introduce the Multi-Channel Flow-Aware Medium Access Control protocol, or (MFLAMA), an energy-efficient, schedule-based, multi-channel medium-access control (MAC) protocol designed for data gathering applications in wireless sensor networks. MFLAMA improves the channel utilization by establishing collision-free transmission schedules across multiple channels. Energy efficiency is achieved by preventing packet collisions, idle listening, and transmissions to a node that is not ready to receive packets. We evaluate MFLAMA through extensive simulations and quantify the improvement in channel utilization through the use of multiple channels. Our results indicate that as we increase the number of orthogonal channels used for communication, there is significant improvement in channel utilization and queueing delay. However, we notice a "diminishing returns" effect as we increase the number of channels, i.e., the performance improvements observed decrease with the number of channels beyond a certain threshold. This threshold depends on the topology and traffic flow patterns being used.