Z-MAC: A Hybrid MAC for Wireless Sensor Networks

Author

Rhee, Injong ; Warrier, Ajit ; Aia, Mahesh ; Min, Jeongki ; Sichitiu, Mihail L.

Author_Institution

Comput. Sci. Dept., North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC

Volume

16

Issue

3

fYear

2008

fDate

6/1/2008 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

511

Lastpage

524

Abstract

This paper presents the design, implementation and performance evaluation of a hybrid MAC protocol, called Z-MAC, for wireless sensor networks that combines the strengths of TDMA and CSMA while offsetting their weaknesses. Like CSMA, Z-MAC achieves high channel utilization and low latency under low contention and like TDMA, achieves high channel utilization under high contention and reduces collision among two-hop neighbors at a low cost. A distinctive feature of Z-MAC is that its performance is robust to synchronization errors, slot assignment failures, and time-varying channel conditions; in the worst case, its performance always falls back to that of CSMA. Z-MAC is implemented in TinyOS.

Keywords

access protocols; channel allocation; time-varying channels; wireless sensor networks; CSMA; TDMA; TinyOS; Z-MAC; channel utilization; hybrid MAC protocol; slot assignment failures; synchronization errors; time-varying channel conditions;; wireless sensor networks; CSMA; MAC; TDMA; wireless sensor networks;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Networking, IEEE/ACM Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1063-6692

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TNET.2007.900704

Filename

4453818