Nowadays, the rapid deployment of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has enabled their application to grow in various industrial fields in our country. Various factors influence the success of WSN development, particularly improvements in Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols, for which WSNs-IoT are deemed vital. Several aspects should be considered, such as energy consumption reduction, performance, scalability for a large deployment of nodes, and clustering intelligence. However, many protocols address this aspect in a constrained view of handling the medium access. This work presents a state-of-the-art review of recently proposed WSN MAC protocols. Different methods and approaches are proposed to enhance the main performance factors. Various performance issue factors are considered to be the main attribute that the MAC protocol should support. A comparison table is given to provide further details about using these approaches and algorithms to improve performance issues, such as network throughput, end-to-end delay, and packet drop, translated into energy consumption.
Keywords: IoT; MAC protocols; Wireless Sensor Networks; energy harvesting; network performance; performance.