C-MAC: A configurable medium access control protocol for sensor networks

Abstract

C-MAC is a highly configurable MAC protocol realized as an architecture of medium access control strategies that can be combined to produce application-specific protocols. By selecting the proper strategies and configuring their parameters, programmers can instantiate MAC protocols that closely match their applications' requirements. C-MAC relies on static metaprogramming techniques to achieve high configurability without compromising size and performance. A previous implementation of C-MAC for the Mica2 mote produced B-MAC-like instances that are smaller, faster, and make better use of the network than the original TINYOS B-MAC. In this work, we implemented and evaluated EPOS C-MAC in the scope of the EPOSMote project. The EPOSMote devices used in this work feature an IEEE 802.15.4 compliant radio. This motivated us to evaluate additional configuration parameters, including synchronization (e.g. beacon-based), contention, and data handling (e.g. error detection). As a result, C-MAC has undergone a major redesign and now features an architecture whose elements are more fine-grained and thus can be reused in a larger variety of scenarios.

A Trustful Infrastructure for the Internet of Things Based on EPOSMote

“…This is due to the use of static metaprogramming techniques (e.g. templates, inline functions, and inline assembly), which ensures that configurability does not come at expense of performance or code size [3]. In this way, C-MAC's instances are fully customized at compile-time and yield extremely lean run-time MACs.…”

“…C-MAC is a highly configurable MAC protocol for WSNs realized as a framework of medium access control strategies that can be combined to produce application-specific protocols [3]. It enables application programmers to configure several communication parameters (e.g.…”

“…It is presented to end users through a trustful communication protocol stack compatible with TCP/IP, which per-definition ensures end-to-end reliable and ordered delivery. Trustfulness is tackled at MAC level by extending C-MAC [3], EPOS native MAC protocol, with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) [4] capabilities that were subsequently used to encrypt and authenticate packets containing IP datagrams. Our authentication mechanism also encompasses temporal information to protect the network against replay attacks.…”

snapMac: A generic MAC/PHY architecture enabling flexible MAC design

“…As shown in Figure 15, the RTT is 10.328 ms. The overhead introduced by node A and B together is 1.816 ms. As mentioned in the Related Work section, in [18] the measured RTT was 60 ms for "No CSMA/CA / ACK", 79 ms for "CSMA/CA / ACK enabled", and 62 ms for Meshnetics ZigBeeNet MAC". We conclude that the processing overhead introduced by snapMac is very low.…”

“…In [18], Steiner et al analyzed traditional MAC protocols in order to obtain a generalized C-MAC state machine (some states are optional or can have different implementations) for three major categories: channel polling, scheduled contention, and time division multiple access. This C-MAC concept is targeted to these three MAC protocol categories and does not support fine-grained, time-accurate control on the radio functions (the Round Trip Time between two nodes is 79 ms).…”