RIVER-MAC: A Receiver-Initiated Asynchronously Duty-Cycled MAC Protocol for the Internet of Things
Mathew L. Wymore, Daji Qiao · 2019
This paper presents RIVER-MAC, a very efficient receiver-initiated asynchronously-duty-cycled medium access control (MAC) protocol for IoT devices. The key innovations of RIVER-MAC include (1) a CCA-based rendezvous to reduce idle listening for the sender node by an order of magnitude, and (2) a beacon train-based collision resolution scheme to reduce contention between receiver nodes, a previously-overlooked issue in receiver-initiated MAC protocol design. We have implemented RIVER-MAC in Contiki OS, and used extensive Cooja simulations to demonstrate its high performance compared to RI-MAC (a classic receiver-initiated protocol), as well as ContikiMAC (a state-of-the-art sender-initiated asynchronously duty-cycled MAC protocol) in our tested scenarios. We also have used analytic studies to show that RIVER-MAC yields a comparable performance with a wakeup radio-based scheme, an emerging alternative to duty-cycled MAC protocols for IoT devices.