On MAC optimization for large-scale wireless sensor network

The media access control (MAC) performance of a large-scale wireless sensor network (L-WSN) determines the efficiency of the wireless communication channel. A good MAC protocol could reduce network energy consumption and network delay, which are two problems to be solved urgently in L-WSN. In this paper, we proposed a multi-level integrated MAC protocol (MI-MAC) to solve the overall performance optimization problem of L-WSN. Compared with other protocols, MI-MAC has two mainly improved performances: (1) It improved binary exponential backoff algorithm by twice back off strategy; (2) It designed a sending and receiving algorithm based on the threshold value to recognize control frames (small frames), which effectively avoids the collision probability of data frame. The simulation results show that the MI-MAC protocol improves network throughput and delay performance, significantly reduces energy consumption, and obtains overall network optimization.