BoX-MACs : Exploiting Physical and Link Layer Boundaries in Low-Power Networking

We present two MAC layers for ultra-low-power wireless networking, BoX-MAC-1 and BoX-MAC-2. Leading low-power MACs today reside in a single layer: BMAC exploits only the physical-layer while XMAC utilizes only the link-layer. In contrast, BoX-MAC-1 and BoX-MAC-2 are cross-layer protocols. BoX-MAC-1 incorporates link-layer information into a predominantly physical-layer sampling approach. BoX-MAC-2 combines physical-layer information into a predominantly link-layer packetized approach. Through analysis and experiments on CC2420-based platforms, we find these cross-layer protocols consume up to 40-50% less energy than XMAC and 30% less energy than BMAC under reasonable workloads. Furthermore, BoXMAC-2 yields up to 46% more throughput than its XMAC counterpart. Together, BoX-MAC protocols provide a comprehensive set of low-power link-layer primitives for a wide range of network workloads. The advantages of these crosslayer MAC designs over single-layer approaches provide insight on requirements for future radio chip and platform

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