Bin-MAC: A Hybrid MAC for Ultra-compact Wireless Sensor Nodes

Abstract

This paper presents a light-weight hybrid protocol called Bin-MAC (Binary Medium Access Control) for highly resource-constrained wireless sensor nodes. In addition to simplicity and low footprint, a distinguishing feature of Bin-MAC is its deterministic contention resolution mechanism, which enables it to achieve bounded latency on data transmissions. As a result, Bin-MAC can be applied to delay-sensitive applications with real-time constraints, a feature not provide by most of the existing hybrid protocols. Another feature of the proposed protocol is that it requires carrier-sensing hardware only on the base station side, and sensor nodes do not have to possess such capability. Bin-MAC does not require clock synchronization, and thus clock drifts have no impact on its performance. Experimental results show Bin-MAC to be scalable and able to handle large network sizes without noticeable performance degradation.