SAMPLER: an optimal MAC algorithm for wireless instrumentation systems

  • Authors:
  • Saikat Ray;Ratul K. Guha;Wisam Yasen;Mary Austin

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Bridgeport;Telcordia Technologies;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Bridgeport;Pratt and Whitney

  • Venue:
  • ICC'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international conference on Communications
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Wireless devices provide flexible solutions for industrial instrumentation applications, such as quality control of manufacture of jet engines. In this context, the dominant issues are providing high-throughput, and reliability in the sense of not losing samples due to buffer overflow at the wireless devices. A random medium access control (MAC) scheme, such as the IEEE 802.15.4, is unlikely to perform well along those metrics. CSMA/CA, the foundation of IEEE 802.15.4, is inefficient at the high-throughput regime. The polling mode of IEEE 802.15.4, on the other hand, ignores the buffer constraints, thereby increasing the risk of buffer overflow. In this paper, we propose SAMPLER, a scheduled MAC protocol that is optimal, in the sense of minimizing sample losses while maximizing throughput, in the typical scenario where a sophisticated access point forms a star topology with the wireless sensors. We describe SAMPLER, its properties and demonstrate its superior performance compared to random-access MAC through simulations.