A medium access control protocol for a wireless network with diverse numbers of transceivers

We envisage future wireless networks to support a myriad of sensors ranging from small temperature sensors lot large video cameras, These sensors are for different applications with different throughput requirements. and a higher throughput can be achieved using more parallel transceivers, one for each channel. Hence, there exist a set of heterogeneous sensors with diverse numbers of transceivers. This paper proposes a medium access control (MAC) protocol to support such a set of heterogeneous nodes in it single network. Since there are multiple transceivers at each node, for each arrived packet. the proposed MAC protocol needs to decide which transceiver to use such that connectivity and fairness requirements can be met. The transceiver selection is based tin a probabilistic scheme where the probabilities are computed off-line according to the load distribution at all channels. Hence. the task of meeting the twit requirements are at load distribution. In view of the problem. we further propose a heuristic load distribution scheme that can guarantee connectivity. Through approximate analysis of the load distribution scheme. the unfairness is found proportional to the number of nodes in the network but in verse proportional to maxinium number of transceivers supported. This analytical performance trend has been confirmed through simulations. To further reduce the unfairness,,in improvement has been made to the basic load distribution scheme. Simulation results indicate that the fairness achieved by the improved scheme is never worse compared to the basic scheme without compromising the connectivity requirement. In short, the proposed MAC protocol has allowed heterogeneous wireless sensors with diverse numbers of transceivers, to co-exist and communicate fairly.