Abstract

This paper investigates the development of a suitable Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for a housing community wireless network that consists of both wireless infrastructural mesh nodes and wireless sensor nodes. In this network, transmit-only sensor nodes are employed in order to obtain a low cost, easy to deploy and low power solution. However, such sensor nodes have no way of verifying successful data transfer and it is, therefore, imperative that the associated MAC protocol provides a high level of confidence for transferring this data. In this paper, we examine methods of packaging and transmitting sensor node data in order to obtain such a MAC protocol for the aforementioned housing community wireless network. Microchip’s rfPIC is used as the platform for the sensor node. Some preliminary analysis and results are presented within.