Recent Advances in MAC Protocols for the Energy Harvesting Based WSN: A Comprehensive Review

Wireless sensor networks are catching the attention of the researchers in various fields like structural, healthcare monitoring, but the real world adoption is getting difficult due to its dependence on the battery power, so energy harvesting comes to its rescue. To utilize the harvested energy in the best manner, MAC protocols which control the transreceiver in a node are presented here. They are different from the battery powered WSN where the focus is on increasing the lifetime of the nodes, rather these protocols focus on improving the quality of the network. With optimal tradeoff between the infinite network lifetime and energy availability, MAC protocols need to be redesigned for energy harvesting based wireless sensor networks (EHWSN). In this paper first EH technology in wireless sensor networks is discussed. Then a survey of EH based MAC protocols is done in a classified manner. The comparison of the protocols is done based on the different metrics such as energy conservation factor, scalability, latency etc. State of the art literature survey is presented so that users have consolidated data to pick up the one based on their application requirement. Challenges specific to applications is presented along with the various gaps to give an insight into the future research directions. To the best of the author’s knowledge, review of all the EHWSN MAC protocols is not reported till date.