EM-MAC: A Dynamic Multichannel Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless sensor networks face many challenges, including energy-efficient operation and robust support for varying traffic loads, in spite of effects such as wireless interference or even possible wireless jamming attacks. This paper presents the design and evaluation of the EM-MAC (Efficient Multichannel MAC) protocol, which addresses these challenges through the introduction of novel mechanisms for adaptive receiver-initiated multichannel rendezvous and predictive wake-up scheduling. EM-MAC substantially enhances wireless channel utilization and transmission efficiency while resisting wireless interference and jamming by enabling every node to dynamically optimize the selection of wireless channels it utilizes based on the channel conditions it senses, without use of any reserved control channel. EM-MAC achieves high energy efficiency by enabling a sender to predict the receiver's wake-up channel and wake-up time Implemented in TinyOS on MICAz motes, EM-MAC substantially outperformed other MAC protocols studied. EM-MAC maintained the lowest sender and receiver duty cycles, the lowest packet delivery latency, and 100% packet delivery ratio across all experiments. Our evaluation includes single-hop and multihop flows, as well as experiments with heavy ZigBee interference, constant ZigBee jamming, and Wi-Fi interference.