Efficient Distributed Medium Access Arbitration for Multi-Channel Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks can be employed in a wide range of applications such as disaster management, combat field surveillance and homeland security. Sensors in such applications are deployed in mass and are usually constrained in the amount of available on-board energy. This paper presents ARCH, a distributed medium access Arbitration of multi-Radio-CHannel based sensor networks. ARCH is an energy efficient, scalable and collision free MAC layer protocol that combines frequency and time division principles for medium sharing. To achieve scalability sensors are partitioned into cells.