Towards Dynamic Polling: Survey and Analysis of Channel Polling Mechanisms for Wireless Sensor Networks

The tremendously increasing number of WSN applications calls for the efficient management of energy which is often achieved through developing the energy efficient MAC protocols. Polling based MAC protocols were introduced to achieve energy efficiency by making the nodes independently waking up and checking the channel activity. Dynamic polling is relatively a recent technique deployed in a number of asynchronous protocols; this type of polling ensures that nodes preserve the energy which can otherwise be lost in the activities of over hearing, idle listening, congestion and synchronization. This paper surveyed the recent WSN MAC protocols based on dynamic polling mechanism. In order to achieve better energy and delay performance, the suggestion for studying and selecting the polling interval distribution for MAC protocols has been made in the light of analysis.