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

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.

People

• Kyle Jamieson
• Hari Balakrishnan
• Y. C. Tay

Publications

• Kyle Jamieson, Hari Balakrishnan, Y. C. Tay. Sift: a MAC Protocol for Event-Driven Wireless Sensor Networks. Proceedings of the Third European Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN), February 2006, pp. 260-275.
• Y. C. Tay, Kyle Jamieson, Hari Balakrishnan. Collision-Minimizing CSMA and its Applications to Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 22:6 (2004), 1048-1057.
• Kyle Jamieson, Hari Balakrishnan, Y. C. Tay. Sift: a MAC Protocol for Event-Driven Wireless Sensor Networks. MIT LCS Technical Report MIT-LCS-TR-894, May 2003.

Download

• Patch from ns-2.1b9 (patch)