QMMAC: Quorum-Based Multichannel MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, energy conservation is a critical task. Thus, it is crucial to design an effective MAC protocol that minimizes energy consumption while guaranteeing high network throughput and low delay. In this article, we propose a quorum-based multichannel MAC protocol (QMMAC) for corona-based WSNs. QMMAC utilizes the multichannel communication feature and the quorum concept to greatly increase the throughput while conserving energy. The aim of this protocol is to allow each node and all its forwarders to wake up at the same time while avoiding collision and overhearing by separating their simultaneous communications using the multichannel feature. More precisely, the main idea of QMMAC is twofold. First, QMMAC wakeup scheduling is designed to minimize the end-to-end delay by allowing nodes to wake up at exactly the same time as their potential forwarders, whereas nodes that are not acting as forwarders for each other wake up at a completely different time, and thus overhearing, idle listening and collisions are avoided. Second, channel assignment, which also uses the concept of quorums, is used to share data channels so that there is no conflict or additional packet exchange required to negotiate the availability of channels. Thus, the end-to-end delay is further minimized as well as collisions between conflicting neighbors are avoided. Simulation results indicate that the network performance is improved by QMMAC in terms of energy efficiency, throughput and end-to-end delay.