SCADDS: Scalable Coordination A rchitectures for Deeply Distributed Systems

Radio Communication Stack on Mica Motes

• Flexible architecture that allows people to easily build different components at different layers. The nested header structure allows each component to freely define its own packet formats and add its header fields in packets from upper layers.

• Clean separation of MAC and PHY allows different MACs can be built on the same PHY. The PHY can reliably and efficiently handle variable length packets up to 250 bytes, and is robust to back-to-back packet transmission.

• S-MAC provides energy-efficient operations on radio

• Low-duty-cycle operation on radio trades off latency for energy savings.

• Overhearing avoidance -- sleep when neighbors are talking

• Abundant features in unicast provided by S-MAC (similar to IEEE 802.11).

• RTS/CTS/Data/ACK mechanism is Robust to collisions, hidden terminal problem, and data packet losses.

• Fragmentation support for long messages

Publications

• A Flexible and Reliable Radio Communication Stack on Motes

Wei Ye, John Heidemann and Deborah Estrin, Detailed Documentation of the Radio Communication Stack.

• An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks (ps) (pdf )

Wei Ye, John Heidemann and Deborah Estrin, In Proceedings of the 21st International Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (INFOCOM 2002), New York, NY, USA, June, 2002.

Software