Demo: Towards a MAC Protocol App Store
Jan Bauwens, Bart Jooris, Eli De Poorter, Peter Ruckebusch, Ingrid Moerman · Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) · 2016
In recent years there has been a growing interest in the Internet-of-Things (IoT), leading to an expanding number of wireless environment and application domains in which IoT deployments are realized. Over the course of its lifetime, an IoT device will be exposed to different environments and varying demands in terms of network throughput, latency, power consumption, etc. For instance, consider the case of transportation and logistics where sensors will be attached to goods, pallets and containers, monitoring their respective state. These nodes need to work optimally every step of the supply chain: from frequent monitoring in densely packed warehouses to infrequent monitoring during overseas transit. The Medium Access Control (MAC) plays a major role in how a device handles the (changing) application requirements and environment. Unfortunately today there is no onesize-fits-all MAC protocol that works well in all cases. This causes an ever increasing number of MAC protocols that are each optimized for a certain application [1]. There have also been some hybrid or adaptive protocols developed to cope with different environments [2], but even they have limitations in reconfiguring the parameters or changing the behaviour of MAC protocols.