Many sensor network applications feature bursty traffic patterns: after long 
periods of idle time with almost no network traffic, large amounts of data 
have to be transmitted reliably and in a timely manner. One example is volcano 
monitoring \cite{volcano}, where precious high-volume data is generated by 
rare volcanic eruptions. 

Unfortunately, existing MAC protocols do not sufficiently support such 
applications with bursty traffic patterns. CSMA protocols such as WiseMAC or 
SCP-MAP have very low overhead in idle situations, but have high overhead and 
low throughput caused by collisions under high load. In contrast, TDMA 
protocols such as LMAC can handle high loads without collision, but have low 
throughput and significant overhead in idle mode 

BurstMAC closes this gap by combining low idle overhead with high throughput 
under load, while still offering connectivity to all neighboring nodes. We 
present the ideas behind BurstMAC and report initial performance results.