On-Demand Reliable Medium Access in Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network typically consists of a dense deployment of sensor nodes to achieve higher resolution and better network coverage. Having a dense network increases the fault-tolerance and robustness of the system. However, if not properly handled, it can lead to more collisions during transmission and also network congestion. Furthermore, wireless communication is inherently unpredictable and error-prone. Hence, it is imperative to design an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol that facilitates guaranteed delivery of data over unreliable wireless links. In this paper, we have designed an on-demand reliable MAC (RMAC) protocol that enables timely delivery of data. We have demonstrated its superior performance over existing reliability-enforcing approaches in terms of reliability, latency, scalability and energy-efficiency. 1