Workshop on ns-3

Research Article

McMAC: a power efficient, short preamble Multi-Channel Medium Access Control protocol for wireless sensor networks

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/icst.simutools.2012.247790,
        author={riccardo bonetto and Nicola Bui and Michele Rossi and Michele Zorzi},
        title={McMAC: a power efficient, short preamble Multi-Channel Medium Access Control protocol for wireless sensor networks},
        proceedings={Workshop on ns-3},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={WNS3},
        year={2012},
        month={6},
        keywords={mac multi channel ieee 802154 wireless sensor network simulation ns-3},
        doi={10.4108/icst.simutools.2012.247790}
    }
    
  • riccardo bonetto
    Nicola Bui
    Michele Rossi
    Michele Zorzi
    Year: 2012
    McMAC: a power efficient, short preamble Multi-Channel Medium Access Control protocol for wireless sensor networks
    WNS3
    ACM
    DOI: 10.4108/icst.simutools.2012.247790
riccardo bonetto1,*, Nicola Bui2, Michele Rossi1, Michele Zorzi1
  • 1: Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua
  • 2: Patavina Technologies S.r.l.
*Contact email: bonettor@dei.unipd.it

Abstract

In this paper we present McMAC, a lightweight, low power and multi-channel MAC protocol for duty cycled Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) based on the strobed preamble sampling technique first presented in XMAC. Although many MAC protocols for duty cycled WSNs have been proposed so far, McMAC is the first protocol, to the best of the authors' knowledge, that exploits in a lightweight fashion parallel transmissions over the entire range of IEEE 802.15.4 channels. This results in considerable improvements in terms of energy saving and achievable throughput with respect to preamble sampling based protocols relying on a single channel. McMAC has been implemented in the ns-3 simulation environment, on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 module, which we have improved in order to better account for multi channel support and dynamic spectrum representation. Finally, ns-3 has been used to validate and test McMAC comparing its performance against that of XMAC.