Experiments with periodic channel listening mac algorithms for specknets

Abstract

This paper presents the results of experiments to compare the performance of energy-efficient SpeckMAC Medium Access Control (MAC) algorithms, SpeckMAC-D and SpeckMAC-B, with the Berkeley MAC for miniature resource-constrained mobile ad-hoc networks, such as Specknets. These MAC algorithms conserve energy by reducing the amount of idle-listening time during communications by periodic sampling of the radio channel. Previous work had compared the three algorithms on the ProSpeckz hardware in terms of the lifetime of the batteries powering the platform: SpeckMAC protocols achieved longer lifetimes compared to B-MAC, especially for batteries with smaller capacities. This paper presents further analysis of the performance of the MAC algorithms through experiments, on the Perspeckz-64, a test-bed of 64 ProSpeckz nodes, for power consumption of unicast and broadcast traffic, the delivery ratio. and one-hop and multi-hop latencies. The results demonstrated that the SpeckMAC algorithms outperformed B-MAC for all the metrics considered.