A Non Destructive Interference based receiver-initiated MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Non-destructive concurrent transmissions recently attract widespread attention in wireless sensor networks research community, and many studies demonstrate that non-destructive interference in concurrent transmissions enables routing-free packet transmission with low latency and increased reliability. In this paper, we present a new MAC protocol, called Non-Destructive Interference MAC (NDI-MAC), that integrates non-destructive simultaneous transmissions into receiver-initiated protocols, achieving energy efficient and low latency data transmission under a variety of traffic loads. The capture effect is exploited in NDI-MAC to finish rendezvous between multiple senders and receivers. NDI-MAC also relies on triggercast, a distributed middleware to trigger synchronous packet transmissions with constructive interference. So as to ensure single-hop reliability, backcast primitive is used under unicast traffic. Evaluation results show that NDI-MAC achieves high performance in terms of energy consumption and data delivery latency under data dissemination and collection traffic.