Hello RIOTers,
I want to use RIOT for a low-power 802.15.4 network project. Having a
bit familiarized with RIOT and my samr21-xpro boards now I want to
tackle my next milestone, i.e. I need a MAC protocol that fits my
requirements (see below).
As it seems that there are only 2 MAC implementations for now [1,2],
both not what I'm searching for and also not merged, I decided to try
this on my own.
Therefore I studied some papers and existing MAC schemes to not reinvent
the wheel. There is one nice paper [3] that sums up quite nicely the
most basic duty-cycling schemes (p. 4ff).
There are some adaptions and refinements to these protocols which might
improve the throughput or energy-saving further, but I think that these
basic schemes already provide a good starting point. Namely there is
ContikiMAC [4] that incorporates these improvements.
While I want to start implementing a basic and simple protocol first, I
wonder if it could be nice for RIOT to have some ContikiMAC-compatible
MAC layer later.
I can't promise anything for now on how well this will work in the end,
but I wanted to inform you about my undertaking and maybe you have some
thought or pointers that could help me. As there is so much change in
all over the network stack at the moment, it would be nice to know which
(for me relevant) parts of the stack I should use that are not subject
to change shortly.
I gathered some notes and requirements, please find them below.
Best regards,
Daniel Krebs
[1] https://github.com/rousselk/RIOT/commits/s-cosens
[2] https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/pull/2467
[3] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4539479
[4] http://dunkels.com/adam/dunkels11contikimac.pdf
Requirements for MAC-layer
==========================
# Requirements
* Mesh topology => no single-point-of-failure
* Low energy consumption
* Relatively small single-hop network (~10 nodes)
* New nodes can join and leave the network
* No need to comply with IEEE 802.15.4 MAC schemes
* No need for hard realtime
* Should be reasonibly simple to implement
# Ideas / Questions
* Do we need broadcasting?
* Add multi-hop / routing later? Is this even reasonable?
* Do we really need adaption to traffic load?
* Find out which APIs to use in RIOT to have a modular MAC protocol
that might
work with multiple transceivers
# Observations
* Requirements seem to match ContikiMAC, so maybe aim for compatibility?
# Implementation
* Duty cycle nodes for energy saving
* LPEAS => Implicit synchronization
* Use 802.15.4 features, so this might only work with 802.15.4 networks
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