Performance evaluation of synchronous and asynchronous MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In the wireless sensor networks (WSNs), Synchronous approaches share the schedule information that specifies the cycle of active and sleep period by the control packets. On the other hand, asynchronous approaches do not exchange the synchronization information to send or receive data. Instead, they employ preamble sampling to do that. In this paper, we compare and analyze synchronous and asynchronous MAC protocols for WSNs with our two proposed schemes (AD-MAC and AS-MAC). Our proposed schemes present an enhanced adaptive duty cycling and high low power listening algorithm for energy efficiency, respectively. The performance of those two MAC mechanisms with our proposed protocols will be investigated through simulation and analysis to design the effective MAC protocol in WSNs.