Enhancing ContikiMAC for bursty traffic in mobile sensor networks

This work focuses on Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). We investigate preamble-sampling solutions that allow asynchronous operation. We introduce anycast transmission to ContikiMAC where a mobile node first emits an anycast data packet whose first acknowledging node will serve as responsible to forward it towards the sink. Once this link is established, burst transmission can start, according to the respective burst handling mechanism of ContikiMAC. Although it is considered as negligible in the literature, such an anycast-based on-the-fly attachment actually results in high packet duplication at the sink. Our contribution is twofold. We first present that even a basic anycast-based ContikiMAC would fail to handle bursty traffic from mobile nodes mainly due to increased traffic and channel occupancy. We then propose lightweight adaptations that drastically reduces the duplications in the network thus, improving network performance while reducing energy consumption.