Contention-free MAC protocols for asynchronous wireless sensor networks

• DOI: 10.1007/s00446-007-0053-x
• Publication Date: 2008-01-03T12:48:49Z
• Authors: Costas Busch; Malik Magdon-Ismail; Fikret Sivrikaya; Bülent Yener
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

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.