UMAC: A Universal MAC protocol for Wireless Networks

Abstract

There are a number of wireless networks such as MANETs, WSNs, WLANs, BAN etc. which have come into prominence during the past several decades because of various kinds of requirements. From the very beginning, the design of various MAC protocols for these networks has been considered independently, targeting a few specific issues of the networks. Additionally, due to lack of compatibility with older protocols, various MAC protocols designed for wireless networks and available in the literature are not widely used in practice. We strongly believe that there is a requirement for a universal MAC (UMAC) protocol for mobile devices with multiple type of sensors, which can be used for a large spectrum of applications with different parametric requirements, deployment scenarios and device capabilities. In this paper, we first propose the design guidelines for such a UMAC, and then give an implementation of the same as an extension of IEEE 802.11 MAC, and the performance analysis of the proposed UMAC.