Contention-free MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks

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

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

34 Scopus citations

Abstract

A MAC protocol specifies how nodes in a sensor network access a shared communication channel. Desired properties of such MAC protocol are: it should be distributed and contention-free (avoid collisions); it should self-stabilize to changes in the network (such as arrival of new nodes), and these changes should be contained, i.e., affect only the nodes in the vicinity of the change; it should not assume that nodes have a global time reference, i.e., nodes may not be time-synchronized. We give the first MAC protocols that satisfy all of these requirements, i.e., we give distributed, contention-free, self-stabilizing MAC protocols which do not assume a global time reference. Our protocols self-stabilize from an arbitrary initial state, and if the network changes the changes are contained and the protocol adjusts to the local topology of the network. The communication complexity, number and size of messages, for the protocol to stabilize is small (logarithmic in network size).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)245-259
Number of pages15
JournalLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume3274
DOIs
StatePublished - 2004
Externally publishedYes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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