CyclicMAC: A Cyclic MAC Scheduling Scheme for Gathering Data from Heterogeneous Sensors

Many data gathering systems require the deployment of heterogeneous sensors to detect various aspects of the target and the use of wireless networks to transmit sensed data to the control center. The data rates of the heterogeneous sensors may range from a few bytes per minute to megabytes per second. To support the transmissions of such diverse rates of data through the wireless network, we propose a novel MAC scheduling scheme, CyclicMAC. CyclicMAC assigns each sensor a cyclic MAC schedule according to the data rates of its sensed as well as relaying data, without causing any channel contention. As far as we know, CyclicMAC is the first to address at the same time all three design issues in MAC scheduling: heterogeneous data rate, end-to-end latency, and storage for scheduling table, for multihop wireless sensor networks.