Strawman: Resolving collisions in bursty low-power wireless networks

Low-power wireless networks must leverage radio duty cycling to reduce energy consumption, but duty cycling drastically increases the risk of radio collisions, resulting in power-expensive retransmissions or data loss. We present Strawman, a contention resolution mechanism designed for low-power duty-cycled networks that experience traffic bursts. Strawman efficiently resolves network contention, mitigates the hidden terminal problem, and has zero overhead unless activated to resolve data collisions. Our testbed experiments show that Strawman instantaneously provides increased network capacity when needed, allocates the available bandwidth evenly among contenders, and increases energy efficiency in multihop collection networks compared to the traditionally used random backoff.