Enabling flexible medium access design for wireless sensor networks

The diversified applications of wireless sensor networks impose different types of requirements on MAC protocols. Therefore, it has become increasingly important to be able to prototype new MAC designs efficiently. In this paper, we describe a component based framework, which enables flexible and rapid MAC designing for sensor networks. We have identified and implemented a basic component library, which serves as the basis for realizing a wide range of protocol designs. We provide an interactive graphical user interface for designing MAC protocols and a tool-chain for auto-code generation. This takes off the burden of learning programming language and platform details from the designers. Our framework facilitates fast prototyping of MAC solutions and allows reusability of existing design sessions through an interactive `drag n drop' based user friendly environment. We have carried out detailed performance comparison of widely known MAC protocols developed through our framework to their monolithic counterparts on real sensor network testbed. Our results indicate that the framework allows high degree of component reusability across different MAC implementations without compromising performance characteristics and imparting only a slight memory overhead.