Abstract: Wireless sensor network (WSN) gives a vast area for researchers due to its extensive range of applications such as in healthcare system, environment, military, commercial and structural monitoring etc. The MAC protocols of WSN attract the researcher in the last two decades due to its significance role in the power saving and increase the lifetime of WSN. As WSN is built from a large number of sensors node which operated on batteries, replacing those batteries or recharging them is not cost effective. A lot of work is going on to increase the lifetime of sensor nodes and decrease the power consumption. This survey paper proposed different type of MAC protocols, their behaviour, used strategy and lacking area. After that, we discussed few typical power saving MAC protocols and compare the performance as well. Performance comparing of such protocols gives idea for taking the suitable strategy and protocol for new researcher to take a right direction. Finally, we introduce the Network Simulator version 2.0 (NS-2), using NS-2 we simply analysis the throughput, jitter and delay of simple 6 node mesh topology.

Keywords: WSNs, MAC protocols, NS-2