SOFA: Medium Access Control in Extreme Wireless Sensor Networks

This report introduces a MAC protocol for gossiping in mobile large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). These systems present novel challenges that cannot be handled by current state-of-the-art protocols, such as mobility, scalability, and energy efficiency. We present the idea of SOFA (stop-on-thefirst-ack), an opportunistic MAC protocol that supports gossip and leverages its characteristic i.e., peer selection, to efficiently diffuse and process information while scaling to thousands of nodes with hundreds of neighbors. We show a first evaluation of SOFA and how the stop-on-fist-ack idea can be applied to different kind of MACs to generate a whole new family of protocols.