Abstract
Wireless sensor nodes typically switch between sleep and wake periods. This poses a rendezvous problem on message senders and recipients. X-MAC, a state of the art sensor network medium access control (MAC) protocol, solves this problem by sending a strobe of short preambles from the message sender until the message recipient wakes up. Upon wake-up, the recipient receives the next strobe, signals the message sender that it is ready to receive, and the message transmission can take place. In sink oriented communication, geographic greedy routing, and link reversal routing, a forwarding node may have more than one potential next hop forwarding node. X-MAC does not support such opportunistic communication patterns. Instead it requires the sender to name the recipient explicitly. However, preamble length can be saved when message transmission starts as soon as the first one of the set of potential next hop nodes is waken up by a preamble. This requires PaderMAC, a new MAC protocol, where the decision on the next hop node is shifted from the sender to the receiver. This work specifies the PaderMAC protocol, explains the implementation of that protocol using TinyOS and the MAC layer architecture (MLA), describes a contribution to the MLA which is useful also for other MAC layer implementations, and presents the results of a testbed and theoretical performance study. The testbed study compares PaderMAC in conjunction with opportunistic routing to X-MAC in conjunction with path-based routing and shows how PaderMAC reduces the preamble length, better balances the load and further improves the end-to-end latency within the network.













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Autenrieth, M., Frey, H. PaderMAC: Energy-efficient machine to machine communication for cyber-physical systems. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 7, 243–254 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-013-0241-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-013-0241-3