Medium access controlfacing the reality of WSN deployments

Although research on algorithms and communication protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has yielded a tremendous effort so far, most of these protocols are hardly used in real deployments nowadays. Several reasons have been put forward in recent publications. In this paper, we further investigate this trend from a Medium Access Control (MAC) perspective by analyzing both the reasons behind successful deployments and the characteristics of the MAC layers proposed in the literature. The effort allocated to develop suitable protocols from scratch every new deployment could however be minimized by using already existing contributions which provide code reuse and adaptive protocols. Though we advocate their use for nowadays deployments, we have identified several shortcomings in foreseen scenarios for which we provide guidelines for future researches.

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