A Connection-Oriented, Multi-Hop, Multi-Channel TDMAbased MAC for High Throughput Bulk Transfer

In this paper, we consider the goal of achieving high throughput in a wireless sensor network. Our work is set in the context of those wireless sensor network applications which collect and transfer bulk data. We present PIP (Pack-ets in Pipe), a MAC primitive for use by the transport module to achieve high throughput. PIP has a unique set of features: (a) it is a multi-hop connection oriented primitive, (b) it is TDMA-based, (c) it uses multiple radio channels, and (d) it is centrally controlled. This represents a significant shift from prior MAC protocols for bulk data transfer. PIP has several desirable properties: (a) its throughput degrades only slightly with increasing number of hops, (b) it is robust to variable wireless error rates, (c) it performs well even without any flow control, and (d) requires only small queue sizes to operate well. We substantiate these properties with a prototype implementation of PIP on the Tmote-Sky CC2420-based platform. PIP achieves about twelve times better throughput than the state-of-the-art prior work, over a network depth of ten nodes