Abstract
Nodes in sensor networks often encounter spatially-correlated contention, where multiple nodes in the same neighborhood all sense an event they need to transmit information about. Furthermore, in many sensor network applications, it is sufficient if a subset of the nodes that observe the same event report it. We show that traditional carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) protocols for sensor networks do not handle the first constraint adequately, and do not take advantage of the second property, leading to degraded latency as the network scales in size. We present Sift, a medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks designed with the above observations in mind. We show using simulations that as the size of the sensor network scales up to 500 nodes, Sift can offer up to a 7-fold latency reduction compared to other protocols, while maintaining competitive throughput.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. CNS-0205445 and CNS-0520032. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Kahn, J., Katz, R., Pister, K.: Mobile Networking for Smart Dust. In: Proc. of the ACM MOBICOM Conf., Seattle, WA, pp. 271–278 (1999)
IEEE 802.11 Standard: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control and Physical Layer Specifications (1999)
Polastre, J., Hill, J., Culler, D.: Versatile Low Power Media Access for Wireless Sensor Networks. In: Proc. of the ACM SenSys Conf., Baltimore, MD, pp. 95–107 (2004)
Ye, W., Heidemann, J., Estrin, D.: An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. In: Proc. of the IEEE INFOCOM Conf., New York, NY, pp. 1567–1576 (2002)
Bharghavan, V.: MACAW: A Media Access Protocol for Wireless LANs. In: Proc. of the ACM SIGCOMM Conf., London, UK, pp. 212–225 (1994)
Jamieson, K., Tay, Y.C., Balakrishnan, H.: Sift: a MAC Protocol for Event-Driven Wireless Sensor Networks. Technical Report MIT-LCS-TR-894, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003)
USC ISI: ns-2 Notes and Documentation (2002), http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns
Wan, C.Y., Eisenmen, S., Campbell, A.: CODA: Congestion Control in Sensor Networks. In: Proc. of the ACM Sensys Conf., Los Angeles, CA, pp. 266–279 (2003)
Woo, A., Culler, D.: A Transmission Control Scheme for Media Access in Sensor Networks. In: Proc. of the ACM MOBICOM Conf., Rome, Italy, pp. 221–235 (2001)
Vaidya, N., Bahl, V., Gupta, S.: Distributed Fair Scheduling in a Wireless LAN. In: Proc. of the ACM MOBICOM Conf., Boston, MA, pp. 167–178 (2000)
Intanagonwiwat, C., Govindan, R., Estrin, D.: Directed Diffusion: A Scalable and Robust Communication Paradigm for Sensor Networks. In: Proc. of the ACM MOBICOM Conf., Boston, MA, pp. 56–67 (2000)
Madden, S., Franklin, M., Hellerstein, J., Hong, W.: TAG: a Tiny AGregation Service for Ad-Hoc Sensor Networks. In: Proc. of the USENIX OSDI Symp., Boston, MA, pp. 131–146 (2002)
Ye, F., Luo, H., Cheng, J., Lu, S., Zhang, L.: A Two-Tier Data Dissemination Model for Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks. In: Proc. of the ACM MOBICOM Conf., Atlanta, GA, pp. 148–159 (2002)
Ratnasamy, S., Karp, B., Yin, L., Yu, F., Estrin, D., Govindan, R., Shenker, S.: GHT: A Geographic Hash Table for Data-Centric Storage. In: Proc. of the ACM WSNA Workshop, Atlanta, GA, pp. 78–87 (2002)
Cai, Z., Lu, M., Wang, X.: Randomized Broadcast Channel Access Algorithms for Ad Hoc Networks. In: Proc. of the IEEE Intl. Conf. on Parallel Processing, pp. 151–158 (2002)
European Telecommunication Standard: HIgh PErformance Radio Local Area Network (HIPERLAN) Type 1; Functional Specification (1996)
Cho, K.O., Shin, H.C., Lee, J.K.: Performance Analysis of HIPERLAN Channel Access Control Protocol. Proc. of the ICICE Trans. on Comm. E85-B, 2044–2052 (2002)
Mowafi, O., Ephremides, A.: Analysis of a Hybrid Access Scheme for Buffered Users—Probabilistic Time Division. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering 8, 52–60 (1982)
Rhee, I., Warrier, A., Aia, M., Min, J.: Z-MAC: A Hybrid MAC for Wireless Sensor Networks. In: Proc. of the ACM SenSys Conf., San Diego, CA, pp. 90–101 (2005)
Tan, G., Guttag, J.: The 802.11 MAC Protocol Leads to Inefficient Equilibria. In: Proc. of the IEEE INFOCOM Conf., Miami, FL, pp. 1–11 (2005)
Heinzelman, W., Chandrakasan, A., Balakrishnan, H.: Energy-Efficient Communication Protocol for Wireless Microsensor Networks. In: Proc. of the 33rd Hawaii International Conf. on System Sciences, HICSS (2000)
Singh, S., Woo, M., Raghavendra, C.: Power-Aware Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. In: Proc. of the ACM MOBICOM Conf., Dallas, TX, pp. 181–190 (1998)
Chen, B., Jamieson, K., Balakrishnan, H., Morris, R.: Span: An Energy-Efficient Coordination Algorithm for Topology Maintainence in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks. In: Proc. of the ACM MOBICOM Conf., Rome, Italy, pp. 85–96 (2001)
Wattenhofer, R., Li, L., Bahl, V., Wang, Y.M.: Distributed Topology Control for Wireless Multihop Ad-hoc Networks. In: Proc. of the IEEE INFOCOM Conf., Anchorage, AK, pp. 1370–1379 (2001)
Xu, Y., Heidemann, J., Estrin, D.: Geography-Informed Energy Conservation for Ad Hoc Routing. In: Proc. of the ACM MOBICOM Conf., Rome, Italy, pp. 70–84 (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Jamieson, K., Balakrishnan, H., Tay, Y.C. (2006). Sift: A MAC Protocol for Event-Driven Wireless Sensor Networks. In: Römer, K., Karl, H., Mattern, F. (eds) Wireless Sensor Networks. EWSN 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3868. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11669463_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11669463_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-32158-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32159-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)