Analysis of Slotted Multi-Access Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we study the single-packet medium access problem, which occurs in many wireless sensor network applications. In this problem, each contending node in the onehop network has a single packet to transmit and the node is in contention of the channel only until its packet is transmitted. We analyze the performance of slotted multi-access techniques for this problem using Markov chains and flow equations. We verify the accuracy of these analyses through simulations. We also present a thorough performance evaluation of these techniques in terms of delay and energy consumption for various design parameters.