C-MAC: Model-Driven Concurrent Medium Access Control for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents C-MAC, a new MAC protocol designed to achieve high-throughput bulk communication for data-intensive sensing applications. C-MAC exploits concurrent wireless channel access based on empirical power control and physical interference models. Nodes running C-MAC estimate the level of interference based on the physical signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) model and adjust the transmission power accordingly for concurrent channel access. C-MAC employs a block-based communication mode that not only amortizes the overhead of channel assessment, but also improves the probability that multiple nodes within the interference range of each other can transmit concurrently. C-MAC has been implemented in TinyOS-1.x and extensively evaluated on Tmote nodes. Our experiments show that C-MAC significantly outperforms the state-of-art CSMA protocol in TinyOS with respect to system throughput, delay and energy consumption.