BurstMAC — An efficient MAC protocol for correlated traffic bursts

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, 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. 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.