A preamble-based approach for providing quality of service support in wireless sensor networks

Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are usually designed as random access protocols that apply different kinds of backoff strategies since Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based protocols with admission control are very complex and require additional mechanisms for synchronization. Without such mechanisms, fair or priority based medium access with Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees can hardly be achieved by existing protocols. Therefore, we developed a random access protocol which uses a new preamble-based medium access strategy that enables collision-free priority based access without the need of synchronization. In this paper we introduce different QoS strategies and their use cases. All strategies can be easily integrated in our protocol to meet the requirements of different target applications. Furthermore, we compare the performance of the strategies with a typical carrier-sense based protocol.