Performance Comparison of Contention- and Schedule-based MAC Protocols in Urban Parking Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper compares contention- and schedule-based MAC protocols in urban parking sensor networks, analyzing their energy and delay performance under various traffic models and densities to inform protocol selection for smart city applications.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of two MAC protocols across different traffic models and network densities, offering insights for optimizing urban sensor network performance.

Findings

Contention-based protocols perform better under high traffic density.

Schedule-based protocols offer lower latency in event-driven scenarios.

Energy-delay tradeoffs vary significantly with network density and traffic type.

Abstract

Network traffic model is a critical problem for urban applications, mainly because of its diversity and node density. As wireless sensor network is highly concerned with the development of smart cities, careful consideration to traffic model helps choose appropriate protocols and adapt network parameters to reach best performances on energy-latency tradeoffs. In this paper, we compare the performance of two off-the-shelf medium access control protocols on two different kinds of traffic models, and then evaluate their application-end information delay and energy consumption while varying traffic parameters and network density. From the simulation results, we highlight some limits induced by network density and occurrence frequency of event-driven applications. When it comes to realtime urban services, a protocol selection shall be taken into account - even dynamically - with a special attention to energy-delay tradeoff. To this end, we provide several insights on parking sensor networks.