Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical (PHY) layer are the adjacent layers of
the standard communication architecture. Therefore, they have strong coupling with
each other and changes at the PHY layer do effect on the performance of the MAC
layer. However, researchers quite often ignore the effect of PHY layer on the MAC
layer, particularly while working with simulation. Being the wireless networks,
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) need to deal with the common issues such as
interference, fading, attenuation and other bandwidth related concerns. Moreover,
WSNs have very limited resources, particularly energy, that makes the inter-
dependence of MAC and PHY layer even important. Ignoring this fact may lead to
considerable imprecisions in the model predictions, mainly for wireless protocols.
This thesis work aims to analyze the effect of PHY layer on the well-known BMAC
protocol. Extensive experiments were carried out on OMNeT++ simulation platform
to examine the performance of BMAC protocol with varying parameters at the PHY
layers such as duty cycle, transmission power, radio sensitivity, path loss and
propagation models. The evaluated metrics include energy consumption, data packet
transmission & reception, data forwarding and preamble transmission & reception.
The simulation results suggest that the smaller duty cycle value is suitable for the
packet transmission and reception; moderate values of path loss coefficient are
suitable for practical scenarios and model prediction. Similarly, smaller transmission
power is suitable with increased number of hops only and better sensitivity level
could extend the possible range ofa network that could solve coverage problems ofa
WSN. This research study may help network designer in choosing an optimal value
of the mentioned parameters for an application-specific scenario.