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Contention-free MAC protocols for asynchronous wireless sensor networks

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Abstract

A MAC protocol specifies how nodes in a sensor network access a shared communication channel. Desired properties of a MAC protocol are: it should be contention-free (avoid collisions); it should be distributed and self-stabilize to topological changes in the network; topological changes should be contained, namely, affect only the nodes in the vicinity of the change; it should not assume that nodes have a global time reference, that is, nodes may not be time-synchronized. We give a set of TDMA-based MAC protocols for asynchronous wireless sensor networks satisfying all of these requirements. The communication complexity, number and size of messages, for the protocols to stabilize is small, poly-logarithmic in the network size.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY, 12180, USA

    Costas Busch, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Fikret Sivrikaya & Bülent Yener

  2. Department of Computer Science, Louisiana State University, 280 Coates Hall, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803, USA

    Costas Busch

Authors
  1. Costas Busch
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  2. Malik Magdon-Ismail
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  3. Fikret Sivrikaya
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  4. Bülent Yener
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Correspondence to Costas Busch.

Additional information

A preliminary version of the paper appears in the Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Distributed Computing (DISC 2004), LNCS 3704, pp 245–259, Trippenhuis, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 2004.

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Busch, C., Magdon-Ismail, M., Sivrikaya, F. et al. Contention-free MAC protocols for asynchronous wireless sensor networks. Distrib. Comput. 21, 23–42 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-007-0053-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-007-0053-x

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