Contention-detectable mechanism for receiver-initiated MAC

Abstract

The energy efficiency and delivery robustness are two critical issues for low duty-cycled wireless sensor networks. The asynchronous receiver-initiated duty-cycling media access control (MAC) protocols have shown their effectiveness through various studies. In receiver-initiated MACs, packet transmission is triggered by the probe of receiver. However, it suffers from the performance degradation incurred by packet collision, especially under bursty traffic. Several protocols have been proposed to address this problem, but their performance is restricted by the unnecessary backoff time and long negotiation process. In this article, we present CD-MAC, an energy-efficient and robust contention-detectable mechanism for addressing the collision-catching problem in receiver-initiated MACs. By exploring the temporal diversity of the acknowledgments, a receiver recognizes the potential senders and subsequently polls individual senders one by one. On that basis, CD-MAC can successfully avoid packet collision even though multiple senders have data packets to transmit to the same receiver. We implement CD-MAC in TinyOS and evaluate its performance on an indoor testbed with single-hop and multi-hop network scenarios. The results show that CD-MAC can significantly improve throughput by 1.72 times compared with the state-of-the-art receiver-initiated MAC protocol under bursty traffic loads. The results also demonstrate that CD-MAC can effectively mitigate the influence of hidden terminal problem and adapt to network dynamics well.