A configurable medium access control protocol for IEEE 802.15.4 networks

This paper presents the new design of C-MAC, a highly configurable, low-overhead Medium Access Control protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. This new design was developed within EPOSMote, a project targeted at enabling application-specific deployment scenarios for IEEE 802.15.4 networks. The new C-MAC arose from a careful decomposition of several preexisting MAC protocols aiming at obtaining their state machines. These individual state machines were subsequently merged into a generalized one and captured as a component framework that can be specialized to produce a large variety of application-specific protocols. The framework was implemented in C++ using static metaprogramming techniques, thus ensuring that configurability does not come at expense of performance or code size. The experimental results presented in the paper corroborate the new design with figures comparable to non-configurable, platform-optimized implementations.