McMAC: a power efficient, short preamble multi-channel medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

In this paper we present McMAC, a lightweight, low power and multi-channel MAC protocol for duty cycled Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) based on the strobed preamble sampling technique first presented in XMAC. Although many MAC protocols for duty cycled WSNs have been proposed so far, McMAC is the first protocol, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, that exploits in a lightweight fashion parallel transmissions over the entire range of IEEE 802.15.4 channels. This results in considerable improvements in terms of energy saving and achievable throughput with respect to preamble sampling based protocols relying on a single channel. McMAC has been implemented in the ns-3 simulation environment, on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 module, which we have improved in order to better account for multi channel support and dynamic spectrum representation. Finally, ns-3 has been used to validate and test McMAC comparing its performance against that of XMAC.