Real-World Experiences with the Maximally Traffic-Adaptive Medium Access Control Protocol

Energy-Efficient Medium Access (E-MAC) protocols duty cycling the radio transceiver typically trade off energy-efficiency versus classical quality of service (QoS) parameters (throughput, latency, reliability). Today’s EMAC protocols are able to deliver little amounts of data with a low energy footprint, but introduce severe restrictions with respect to throughput and latency. Regrettably, they yet fail to adapt to varying traffic load at run-time. This paper studies the Maximally Traffic-Adaptive MAC protocol MaxMAC, which targets at achieving maximal adaptability to variable traffic conditions at run-time. By thoroughly analyzing the performance of MaxMAC in a series of distributed experiments, the paper conveys that under variable traffic conditions, MaxMAC effectively combines the advantages of energy unconstrained CSMA (high throughput, high PDR, low latency) with those of classical E-MAC protocols (high energy-efficiency). Real-World Experiences with the Maximally Traffic-Adaptive Medium Access Control Protocol Philipp Hurni, Torsten Braun Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics University of Bern, Neubrueckstrasse 10, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland {hurni, braun}@iam.unibe.ch Abstract—Energy-Efficient Medium Access (E-MAC) protocols duty cycling the radio transceiver typically trade off energyefficiency versus classical quality of service (QoS) parameters (throughput, latency, reliability). Today’s E-MAC protocols are able to deliver little amounts of data with a low energy footprint, but introduce severe restrictions with respect to throughput and latency. Regrettably, they yet fail to adapt to varying traffic load at run-time. This paper studies the Maximally Traffic-Adaptive MAC protocol MaxMAC, which targets at achieving maximal adaptability to variable traffic conditions at run-time. By thoroughly analyzing the performance of MaxMAC in a series of distributed experiments, the paper conveys that under variable traffic conditions, MaxMAC effectively combines the advantages of energy unconstrained CSMA (high throughput, high PDR, low latency) with those of classical E-MAC protocols (high energy-efficiency).