Sift: a MAC Protocol for Event-Driven Wireless Sensor Networks

Kyle Jamieson, Hari Balakrishnan, Y.C. Tay
Third European Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN), Zurich, Switzerland, February 2006

Nodes in sensor networks often encounter spatially-correlated contention, where multiple nodes in the same neighborhood all sense an event they need to transmit information about. Furthermore, in many sensor network applications, it is sufficient if a subset of the nodes that observe the same event report it. Sift is a medium access protocol for wireless sensor networks designed with the above observations in mind. Sift is a randomized CSMA protocol, but unlike previous protocols, does not use a time-varying contention window from which a node randomly picks a transmission slot. Rather, to reduce the latency for the delivery of event reports, Sift uses a fixed-size contention window and a carefully-chosen, non-uniform probability distribution of transmitting in each slot within the window.

[PDF (523KB)] [Presentation (1695KB)]

Bibtex Entry:

@inproceedings{jamieson2006sift,
   author =       "Kyle Jamieson and Hari Balakrishnan and Y.C. Tay",
   title =        "{Sift: a MAC Protocol for Event-Driven Wireless Sensor Networks}",
   booktitle =    {Third European Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN)},
   year =         {2006},
   month =        {February},
   address =      {Zurich, Switzerland}
}