A reliable & efficient multi-channel MAC protocol optimized for industrial wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes the Channel Hopping with Negotiated Pattern (CHNP) protocol, a MAC protocol specially designed for industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) applications. CHNP tries to achieve the reliable communication under the harsh industrial radio environment in an energy and bandwidth efficient way by fully take advantage of the multi-channel capability of radio chips. To the best of our knowledge, CHNP is the first multi-channel MAC protocol specially designed for industrial WSN applications, which pays special attention to the reliability performance, and makes comprehensive optimization on energy, delay, and throughput performance at the same time. The following contributions are made in CHNP: first, a novel MAC framework based on synchronized channel hopping mechanism is proposed, which provides a good platform to perform the comprehensive performance optimization; second, an effective interference domain division mechanism is designed to achieve higher performance; third, an adaptive transmission mechanism is designed, which can sidestep the bad channels and realize reliable communication even under harsh RF environment; last, a sniffing mechanism is provided to achieve low energy operation. Simulation results show that the performance of CHNP achieves a significant improvement over the previous related work in the context of industrial WSN applications.