Bringing Anarchy to TDMA for a Versatile, Fully-Distributed Medium Access Control

Reins-MAC is a TDMA-based MAC. While common TDMA solutions require each node to rigidly follow an agreed upon communication schedule, in Reins-MAC each individual defines its own slot inside the overall frame, in a fully-decentralized fashion. Despite the common belief that such dynamic communication scheduling is infeasible, Reins-MAC both adapts to the current network topology, and allows each node to change the size and position of its slot. Reins-MAC achieves the aforementioned flexibility and anarchy by removing one fundamental parameter of TDMA solutions: the network-wide slot size constant. By adapting the slot size at each node to match the local availability, Reins-MAC achieves tremendous gains in bandwidth utilization.

Reins-MAC builds on the literature of Pulse Coupled Oscillators, which is inspired by firefly behavior, providing a framework for straightforwardly describing its functioning, as detailed in the algorithm section. The effectiveness of the proposed solution has been investigated through a prototype implementation we developped on top of TinyOS, working on TelosB hardware platform.

For development informations, access the Reins project summary page.

Reference Publications

M. Ceriotti
Guaranteeing Communication Quality in Real World WSN Deployments
Advisor: Dr. Amy L. Murphy. PhD Thesis, University of Trento (Italy), April 2011. PDF

M. Ceriotti, and A.L. Murphy
A MAC Contest between LPL (the Champion) and Reins-MAC (the Challenger, an Anarchic TDMA Scheduler Providing QoS)
Demonstration in Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), Zurich, Switzerland, November 2010. PDF

Authors

Reins-MAC has been designed and developped by Matteo Ceriotti and Amy Murphy, at the D3S research group in Trento (Italy).
Please, do not hesitate to contact us!

August 10th, 2011: the web site of Reins-MAC is online!

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