f-MAC: A Deterministic Media Access Control Protocol Without Time Synchronization

Nodes in a wireless network transmit messages through a shared medium. Thus, a Media Access Control (MAC) protocol is necessary to regulate and coordinate medium access. For some application areas it is necessary to have a deterministic MAC protocol which can give guarantees on message delay and channel throughput. Schedule based MAC protocols, based on time synchronization among nodes, are currently used to implement deterministic MAC protocols. Time synchronization is difficult and costly, especially in energy constrained sensor networks. In this paper the f-MAC protocol is presented which can give guarantees regarding message delay and channel throughput without the requirement of time synchronization among nodes. The various trade-offs of f-MAC are analysed and discussed and application areas that would benefit from f-MAC are presented.