BurstMAC - An Efficient MAC Protocol for Correlated Traffic Bursts 

Matthias Ringwald, Kay Römer Institute for Pervasive Computing Department of 
Computer Science ETH Zurich 8092 Zurich, Switzerland 


Many sensor network applications feature correlated traffic bursts: after a 
period of idle time with almost no network traffic, many nodes have to 
transmit large amounts of data simultaneously. One example is volcano 
monitoring [17], where rare eruptions trigger many nodes simultaneously to 
transmit seismic data traces. For such applications, a MAC protocol should 
exhibit a low overhead both in idle mode and during correlated traffic bursts. 
Existing MAC protocols only meet one of these requirements, but not both at 
the same time. Contention-based protocols such as SCP-MAP have very low 
overhead in idle situations, but exhibit high overhead during correlated 
traffic bursts due to contention. Scheduled protocols such as LMAC avoid 
contention overhead during correlated bursts, but exhibit a significant 
overhead in idle mode due to control traffic [10]. We propose BurstMAC, a new 
MAC protocol specifically designed for applications with correlated traffic 
bursts. BurstMAC's idle overhead is almost as low as that of SCP-MAC and at 
the same time provides better throughput and lower energy overhead than LMAC 
during correlated traffic bursts.