Sustainable medium access control: Implementation and evaluation of ODMAC

Abstract

Harvesting small-scale ambient energy constitutes a promising source of power for wireless embedded devices. Due to the unpredictable nature of the harvested energy, adaptive radio duty cycling can lead to a long-term sustainable operation. In energy constrained conditions, very low duty cycles are vital to guarantee the sustainability of the system; whereas, in the opposite case, the system should use the energy surplus to increase the application performance. In this paper, we implement and evaluate On-Demand MAC (ODMAC), the first receiver-initiated MAC protocol specifically designed for energy harvesting applications. In particular, we provide a basic yet fully operational implementation of ODMAC for the Texas Instruments' MSP430 microprocessor family. Furthermore, we verify the theoretical results of our previous work by achieving sustainable operation of an energy harvesting node in various cases of energy input using a real test-bed.