Performance optimisation of multichannel MAC in large-scale wireless sensor network

Efficient multichannel medium access control (MAC) protocols can significantly prolong the lifetime of sensor networks. In this paper, an energy-efficient prediction-based multichannel MAC protocol (PM-MAC) is proposed for large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). PM-MAC minimises sensor node's idle listening time without introducing any multihop time synchronisation and channel assignment overhead by introducing a prediction mechanism of the target node'swakeup channel and wakeup time. PM-MAC introduces a dynamic channel allocation to achieve precise and quick resynchronisation when a prediction error occurs. In addition, inPM-MAC, the load can be well balanced on all channels. Finally, its prediction-based retransmission mechanism can achieve more energy efficiency in resolving severe wireless collisions caused by concurrent traffic in large-scale sensor network. The PM-MAC not only reduces multihop packet latency and energy consumption, but also increases network capacity and throughput. Experimental results confirm the outstanding performance of PM-MAC in all testbeds.