In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), neglecting the effects of varying channel quality can lead to an unnecessary wastage of precious battery resources. This can result in the rapid depletion of sensor energy and partitioning of the network. Fairness is a critical issue when accessing a shared wireless channel and fair scheduling must be employed to provide proper flow of information in WSN. In this paper, a channel adaptive MAC protocol with a traffic-aware dynamic power management algorithm is

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... eveloped for efficient packet scheduling and queuing in a sensor network, with time varying characteristics of wireless channel taken into consideration. To avoid buffer overflow and achieve fairness for the poor quality nodes, a Load prediction algorithm is designed. In addition to these, a traffic aware dynamic power management scheme is also designed to minimize energy consumption by continuously turning off the radio interface of unnecessary nodes that are not included in the routing path. By Simulation results, the proposed protocol is seen to achieve high Throughput and fairness while reducing the energy consumption when compared to a traffic adapted sleep/listening MAC protocol .