A Heuristic Approach for Low Delay Distributed MAC using Successive Interference Cancellation in Priority-Based Industrial Wireless Network

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for industrial manufacturing nowadays are demanding faster delivery of important data than ordinary data. Thus Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols are required to provide low delay media access for traffic of the important data. Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC), which enables multiple-packet reception, gives an opportunity to decrease access delay. Nevertheless, existing MAC protocls are either differetiate access delay for various traffic types without using SIC, or only exploit SIC for unique traffic type. To cover this gap, we propose a distributed MAC protocol that employ SIC to lower access delay for different traffic types in industrial WSNs. By analyzing performance of this protocol, we find a heuristic method to improve adaptability of the proposed protocol and prove the convergence of this heuristic approach. The major contributions of our work are: first, a twostage contention process is adopted in our protocol, which allows multiple transmitters to access edia simutaneously. Second, we analyze performance of the proposed protocol and find a heuristic method to improve it. With the heuristic method, our protocol is available in networks where status of traffic types is unkown. We also prove the convergence of this heuristic method. Simulation results reveal that our protocols performs better on access delay and packet loss rate than the existing good performing priority based distributed MAC protocols.