Simple Contending-type MAC Scheme for Wireless Passive Sensor Networks: Throughput Analysis and Optimization

A wireless passive sensor network is a network consisting of sink nodes, sensor nodes, and radio frequency (RF) sources, where an RF source transfers energy to sensor nodes by radiating RF waves, and a sensor node transmits data by consuming the received energy. Against theoretical expectations, a wireless passive sensor network suffers from many practical difficulties: scarcity of energy, non-simultaneity of energy reception and data transmission, and inefficiency in allocating time resources. Perceiving such difficulties, we propose a simple contending-type medium access control (MAC) scheme for many sensor nodes to deliver packets to a sink node. Then, we derive an approximate expression for the network-wide throughput attained by the proposed MAC scheme. Also, we present an approximate expression for the optimal partition, which maximizes the saturated network-wide throughput. Numerical examples confirm that each of the approximate expressions yields a highly precise value for network-wide throughput and finds an exactly optimal partition.