Abstract

This paper presents the design of a new approach to networking a housing community, through the use of a mesh sensor network that consists of both wireless infrastructural mesh nodes and wireless sensor nodes. One key issue with such networks is the development of a suitable Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for the purpose of transferring data from the sensor nodes to the infrastructural nodes. Here, we use a MAC protocol based on Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) and propose the use of the Rugby MSF broadcast as a synchronisation signal. This novel technique is investigated and some preliminary analysis is outlined.