CSMAC: A novel DS-CDMA based MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes CSMAC (CDMA sensor MAC), a novel self-organizing, location-aware media-access control (MAC) protocol for DS-CDMA based sensor networks for applications such as battlefield surveillance that feature higher traffic and stringent latency requirements. Previously proposed MAC protocols for sensor networks such as S-MAC [W. Ye et al., June 2002] primarily prioritize energy efficiency over latency, Our protocol design balances the considerations of energy efficiency, latency, accuracy, and fault-tolerance in sensor networks. CSMAC uses a combination of DS-CDMA and frequency division in channel allocation to reduce channel interference and consequently the message latency in the network. It exploits location awareness of sensor nodes to enable efficient network formation for collaborative sensing applications using two algorithms - turn off redundant node (TORN) and select minimum neighbor (SMN). Our simulation results show that CSMAC significantly reduces mean message latency and mean energy consumption per message in comparison to traditional sensor network MAC protocols.