Cascading Tournament MAC: Low power, high capacity medium sharing for wireless sensor networks

For energy constrained wireless sensor networks, lifetime is a critical issue. Several medium access control protocols have been proposed to address this issue, often at the cost of poor network capacity. To address both capacity and energy issues, we propose a novel medium sharing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks named Cascading Tournament (CT-MAC). CT-MAC is a synchronous, localized, dynamic, joint contention/allocation protocol. Relying on cascading iterations of tournaments, CT-MAC allocates multiple time slots to nodes that compete for accessing the medium. CT-MAC offers an unprecedented trade-off between traffic delay, network capacity and energy efficiency and stands out as a solid candidate for energy constrained sensor networks that must support heterogeneous traffic loads. Our simulations show that CT-MAC significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art SCP-MAC protocol.