SA-MAC: Self-Stabilizing Adaptive MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

A common method of prolonging the lifetime of wireless sensor networks is to use low power duty cycling protocol. Existing protocols consist of two categories: sender-initiated and receiver-initiated. In this paper, we present SAMAC, a self-stabilizing adaptive MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. SA-MAC dynamically adjusts the transmission time-slot, waking up time-slot, and packet detection pattern according to current network working condition, such as packet length and wake-up patterns of neighboring nodes. In the long run, every sensor node will find its own transmission phase so that the network will enter a stable stage when the network load and qualities are static. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the energy consumption, packet reception rate of SA-MAC in real sensor networking systems. Our results indicate that SA-MAC outperforms other existing protocols.