TreeMAC: Localized TDMA MAC Protocol for Real-time High-data-rate Sensor Networks

—Earlier sensor network MAC protocols focus on energy conservation in low-duty cycle applications, while some recent applications involve real-time high-data-rate signals. This motivates us to design an innovative localized TDMA MAC protocol to achieve high throughput and low congestion in data collection sensor networks, besides energy conservation. TreeMAC divides a time cycle into frames and frame into slots. Parent determines children’s frame assignment based on their relative bandwidth demand, and each node calculates its own slot assignment based on its hop-count to the sink. This innovative 2-dimensional frame-slot assignment algorithm has the following nice theory properties. Firstly, given any node, at any time slot, there is at most one active sender in its neighborhood (including itself). Secondly, the packet scheduling with TreeMAC is bufferless, which therefore minimizes the probability of network congestion. Thirdly, the data throughput to gateway is at least 1/3 of t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PERCOM
• Authors: Wen-Zhan Song, Renjie Huang, Behrooz Shirazi, Richard LaHusen
• Keywords: MAC Protocol, PERCOM 2009, Sensor Networks, TDMA MAC Protocol, Wireless Networks