MAC protocols in ContikiOS

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Introduction

This tutorial covers the main features of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols available on ContikiOS 2.7. Medium Access Control protocols take care of the organization of medium access in wireless networks. They can be interpreted as rules that coordinate when each node is going to transmit/receive packets.

There are a large number of protocols available in the literature, they can usually be classified as contention-based or reservation-based protocols. The first group is based on Carrier Sensing for detecting medium activity and are prone to collisions and lower efficiency; however, they are of easy implementation. The second group is more efficient in terms of throughput and energy, but require precise synchronization and is less adaptable to dynamic traffic. ContikiOS only presents MAC protocols of the first category.

There are about 5 types of MAC layers that can be used in ContikiOS. They are usually implementation of well-known MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks; a few of them are implementations of protocols developed exclusively for ContikiOS, but that were based on previous work present in the literature.

Evaluating ContikiMAC and XMAC protocols

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Edited by: Pedro