Abstract-We present a novel approach for Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol design based on protocol engine. Current way of designing MAC protocols for a specific application is based on two steps: First the application specifications (such as network topology and packet generation rate), the requirements for energy consumption, delay and reliability, and the resource constraints from the underlying physical layer (such as energy consumption and data rate) are specified, and then the protocol that satisfies all these constraints is designed. Main drawback of this procedure is that we have to restart the design process for each possible application, which may be a waste of time and efforts. The goal of a MAC protocol engine is to provide a library of protocols together with their analysis such that for each new application the optimal protocol is chosen automatically among its library with optimal parameters. We illustrate the MAC engine idea by including an original analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 unslotted random access and Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) protocols, and implementing these protocols in the software framework called SPINE, which runs on top of TinyOS and is designed for health care applications. Then we validate the analysis and demonstrate how the protocol engine chooses the optimal protocol under different application scenarios via an experimental implementation.  Index Terms-Wireless Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of a group of nodes, each comprising one or more sensors, a processor, a radio and a battery. Their operations must be energy efficient, because the energy supply of the battery is often limited. Moreover, WSNs are called to offer packet transmission with adequate delay and reception rates for many applications, such as health care, traffic monitoring, active vehicle control systems, and environmental monitoring. Each of these applications requires high performance in its own domain with a different set of requirements for energy consumption, delay and reliability (packet reception rate), different network characteristics (network topology and data generation), and different underlying physical layer technology. The need for the rapid design of protocols for such a variety of application domains brings up the challenge of understanding performance of protocols in various application-specific contexts and automating the protocol design for each new application.
Among previous works the MAC protocol engine REF is similar to ours in perspective of protocol optimization.
MAC Protocol Engine for Sensor Networks
GLOBECOM 2009 - 2009 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference
GLOBECOM 2009 - 2009 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference
Computer Science