A²-MAC: An Adaptive, Anycast MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy constraints in wireless sensor nodes necessitate the design and development of energy-efficient MAC protocols to arbitrate access to the shared communication medium. While there exists a plethora of sensor MAC protocols, these protocols do not individually vary the duty-cycle of each sensor according to local connectivity status, to maximize energy savings. In this paper, we propose A^2-MAC - an Adaptive, Anycast MAC protocol for low-powered wireless sensor networks. It utilizes: (i) a random wakeup schedule, such that each node can independently and randomly wakeup in each cycle without coordination and time synchronization; (ii) adaptive duty-cycles based on network topology; and (iii) adaptive anycast forwarders selection, which allows each node to transmit to any member in its forwarding set. There are two key adaptive mechanisms in A^2-MAC: (i) each node varies its duty-cycle and set of forwarding nodes such that energy consumption can be locally minimized for a given local delay performance objective; and (ii) nodes cooperatively reduce the duty-cycles required of their forwarding nodes, depending on local network connectivity. By allowing nodes to operate with different duty-cycles and forwarding sets, A^2-MAC achieves better energy-latency tradeoffs and extends node lifetime substantially, while providing good end-to-end latency.