A wireless sensor network made up of huge amount of devices that are less in size as well as self-directed and distributed. These devices are known as sensor nodes that comprises of various components. Sensor nodes are low power battery devices. Energy consumption is a vital issue in wireless sensor networks (WSN).Various MAC protocols have been designed to lower the usage of energy in WSN. WSN-MAC protocols are categorized into two types: contention based and schedule based protocols. This paper discusses the challenges of WSN and Schedule - based MAC protocols and compare the various schedule based MAC protocols by highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.

Time division multiple access (TDMA); Wireless Sensor Network (WSN); MAC protocols

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