  Energy conservation has been an important area of interest in Wireless Sensor
networks (WSNs). Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols play an important role
in energy conservation. In this paper, we describe CSMA based MAC protocols for
WSN and analyze the simulation results of these protocols. We implemented
S-MAC, T-MAC, B-MAC, B-MAC+, X-MAC, DMAC and Wise-MAC in TOSSIM, a simulator
which unlike other simulators simulates the same code running on real hardware.
Previous surveys mainly focused on the classification of MAC protocols
according to the techniques being used or problem dealt with and presented a
theoretical evaluation of protocols. This paper presents the comparative study
of CSMA based protocols for WSNs, showing which MAC protocol is suitable in a
particular environment and supports the arguments with the simulation results.
The comparative study can be used to find the best suited MAC protocol for
wireless sensor networks in different environments.
