In this letter, we propose PQ-MAC: a priority-based medium access control (MAC) protocol for providing quality of service (QoS) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) which minimizes the energy consumption with traffic-based sleep-wakeup scheduling and supports QoS using differentiating channel access policy, packet scheduling, and queue management. The PQ-MAC utilizes the advantages of time division multiple access (TDMA) and slotted carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA). The proposed protocol is an energy-efficient, priority-based, and QoS compatible MAC protocol. It consists of multi-level queue management, sleep-wakeup scheduling, and an ordered contention period (CP) scheme. It also guarantees time-bounded delivery of QoS packets. Performance evaluation is conducted between PQ-MAC and S-MAC with respect to three performance metrics: energy consumption, throughput, and average latency. The simulation results show that the performance of PQ-MAC is better than that of S-MAC.

As the number of mobile terminals (or users) keeps explosively increasing, the location management to track mobile terminals in cellular networks is becoming more important. However, the location management schemes presently adopted in cellular networks use static location information without considering the moving direction of a mobile terminal. This approach is insufficient in reflecting the different directional behaviors of mobile terminals. Thus, there is a need to develop a dynamic location management scheme more adaptive to the moving direction of a mobile terminal. This paper proposes a direction-based scheme (DBS) that can determine a location update and vary a paging area dynamically according to the moving direction. The direction vector was defined to represent the moving direction and to compute the distance from the cell where a location update occurs to the current cell. The offset operation of direction vectors represented the location of a mobile terminal in a paging area. This allowed the mobile terminal to determine whether a location update would be performed or not. In addition, simulations showed that DBS outperforms other location management schemes in most cases except in those with a low call-to-mobility ratio (CMR), particularly if a mobile terminal has directional behavior.