Abstract. Media access control (MAC) layer is a very important layer in wireless sensor networks (WSN) since this kind of network is self organizing and has different priorities than regular networks. Due to limited resources, WSN requires special MAC protocols. This work helps to explore some WSN MAC protocols and addresses the kind of problems that are solved by these protocols. Keywords: Wireless sensor networks, WSN MAC layer, WSN technology 1. Introduction Wireless sensor networks use a group of autonomous sensors for different purposes in a large variety of applications. Such networks have the ability to be self organized and failure-adaptive to provide an efficient and reliable network that carries the sensed data towards the sink successfully. To provide efficient and reliable services, many factors have to be considered such as the application environment requirement, reliability of the protocol used in the network and the network consistency. MAC layer is a major reason to provide the reliability and efficiency for WSN. MAC is responsible for channel access policies, scheduling, buffer management and error control. In WSN we need a MAC protocol to consider energy efficiency, reliability, low access delay and high throughput as major priorities to accommodate with sensor’s limited resources and to avoid redundant power consumption [1].
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