RTH-MAC: A real time hybrid MAC protocol for WSN

Abstract

Recently, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) grow to be one of the dominant technology trends; new needs are continuously emerging and demanding more complex constraints, such as the real time communication. The MAC layer plays a crucial role in these networks; it controls the communication module and manages the medium sharing. In this work, we describe the Real Time Hybrid MAC (RTH-MAC) protocol for WSNs. It combines the advantages of both TDMA and FDMA in order to offer a soft real time communication to a converge-cast WSN randomly deployed. It schedules nodes communication in a central manner that eliminates collisions, minimizes interferences, and ensures a small bounded end-to-end delay. Moreover, this protocol offers a probabilistic end-to-end reliability guarantee using an acknowledgment mechanism, and offers to the end user the possibility of adapting the duty cycling ratio. Simulation results show that RTH-MAC presents good performances in term of the end-to-end delay, reliability and scalability.