Analytical study of anycast asynchronous MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks.

This paper presents an analytical model for anycast asynchronous preamble-based medium access control (MAC) protocols. Asynchronous MAC protocols are widely used in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). An important drawback of these protocols is the sleep-delay phenomenon, which may impose high communication latency. In order to tackle this shortcoming, the concept of anycast, i.e., to explore opportunistic path redundancy is employed, instead of selecting a unique next hop. Existing approaches employ arbitrary rules to select the possible next relays. The mathematical model introduced in this work enables a better selection of next hop candidates based on packet size and network density, in order to minimize the sleep-delay. Along with the model, experimental results are presented validating the proposal.