This paper reviews medium access control (MAC), an enabling technology in wireless sensor networks. MAC protocols control how sensors access a shared radio channel to communicate with neighbors. Battery-powered wireless sensor networks with many nearby nodes challenge traditional MAC design. This paper discusses design trade-offs with an emphasis on energy efficiency. It classifies existing MAC...

Cognitive radio (CR) is seen as one of the enabling technologies for realizing a new regulatory spectrum management paradigm, viz. opportunistic spectrum sharing (OSS). In the OSS paradigm, unlicensed users (a.k.a. secondary users) opportunistically operate in fallow licensed spectrum on a non-interference basis to licensed users (a.k.a. incumbent or primary users). Incumbent users have absolut...

The IEEE 802.15.4 protocol offers great potential in several application fields, such as industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). An industrial automation cell (field level) is characterized mostly by periodic traffic flows. Using the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol, it is necessary to manage Guaranteed Time Slots (GTSs) allocation and at the same time ensure adequate performance both to other period...

This paper proposes a medium-access control (MAC) protocol for integrated voice/data services in local wireless communications. The proposed protocol is a hybrid of R-Aloha and Aloha reservation adapted to local wireless environment. In the proposed hybrid Aloha-reservation/R-Aloha (HAR) protocol, data messages are transmitted using Aloha-reservation protocol, whereas voice packets are transmit...

With an increased emphasis on transportation safety requirements, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have emerged as the key underlying technology in the realization of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The IEEE-1609 set of standards for Wireless Access for Vehicular Environment (WAVE) specifies an architecture that includes new standards for vehicular communication, aimed at supporting...

Simultaneous random access of massive machine type communications (MTC) devices are expected to cause congestion in the radio access network. Not only the performance of MTC, but the coexisting human to human (H2H) communications would also degrade dramatically without an appropriate medium access control (MAC) protocol. However, most existing solutions focus on the random access procedure with...

The way in which a Local Area Network access mechanism (,Medium Access Control protocol) designed for a specific ~pe of physical service can be used on top of another type of physical service is discussed using a particular example. In the example, an Ethernet physical layer is used to provide service to the Twentenet real-time access mechanism. Relevant Ethernet and Twentenet concepts are expl...

The paper presents the performance advantage of Wireless Token Ring Protocol (WTRP) versus IEEE 802.11 in DCF mode. WTRP is a medium access control (MAC) protocol and is designed to provide quality of service in WLANs. WTRP supports guaranteed QoS in terms of bounded latency and reserved bandwidth which are crucial constraints of the real time applications and unapplicable in a IEEE 802.11 netw...

We study mission-critical networking in wireless communication networks, where network users are subject to critical events such as emergencies and crises. If a critical event occurs to a user, the user needs to send necessary information for help as early as possible. However, most existing medium access control (MAC) protocols are not adequate to meet the urgent need for information transmiss...