MAC Layer Architecture
The MAC Layer Architecture (MLA) provides a component-based architecture for MAC protocols in wireless sensor networks. MLA extends the Unified Power Management Architecture to provide the hardware-independent interfaces required by timing sensitive MAC protocols, and defines platform-independent reusable components that implement MAC layer logic on top of them. The MLA architecture can be used to develop a large number of platform-independent MAC implementations, with little or no further effort required to adapt these implementations to new hardware platforms.
Our current implementation of MLA is built on top of TinyOS 2.0.2. It currently supports platforms which use the CC2420 radio stack and has been tested on TelosB and MicaZ motes. In addition to providing interfaces and components for building new MAC layer implementations, MLA includes implementations of five representative MAC layers:
- bmac: a port of the BMAC-like NOACK monolithic LPL layer to MLA
- xmac: a port of the XMAC-like ACK monolithic LPL layer to MLA
- scp-wustl: a reimplementation of the SCP-MAC protocol (currently excludes some optimizations)
- pure-tdma: a single-hop TDMA protocol
- ss-tdma: a TDMA/CSMA hybrid protocol which implements Z-MAC's "slot-stealing" optimization
Publications
- Klues, K., Hackmann, G., Chipara, O., and Lu, C., “A Component Based Architecture for Power-Efficient Media Access Control in Wireless Sensor Networks,” Washington University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, St. Louis, Missouri. (published in Proceedings of 5th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2007)) [PDF] [BibTeX]
Software
MLA is available from the wustl/upma directory in the tinyos-2.x-contrib CVS repository. Instructions for accessing the repository are available here. Please read the included README file for instructions on set up and use MLA.
