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1. RIVER-MAC: A Receiver-Initiated Asynchronously Duty-Cycled MAC Protocol for the Internet of Things

   https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC.2019.00126  

   Wymore, Mathew L.; Qiao, Daji (July 2019, 2019 IEEE 43rd Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC))
2. Byzantine Consensus in Abstract MAC Layer

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPICS.OPODIS.2023.9  

   Tseng, Lewis; Sardina, Callie (January 2024, International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems)

   Bessani, Alysson; Défago, Xavier; Nakamura, Junya; Wada, Koichi; Yamauchi, Yukiko (Ed.)

   This paper studies the design of Byzantine consensus algorithms in an asynchronous single-hop network equipped with the "abstract MAC layer" [DISC09], which captures core properties of modern wireless MAC protocols. Newport [PODC14], Newport and Robinson [DISC18], and Tseng and Zhang [PODC22] study crash-tolerant consensus in the model. In our setting, a Byzantine faulty node may behave arbitrarily, but it cannot break the guarantees provided by the underlying abstract MAC layer. To our knowledge, we are the first to study Byzantine faults in this model. We harness the power of the abstract MAC layer to develop a Byzantine approximate consensus algorithm and a Byzantine randomized binary consensus algorithm. Both of our algorithms require only the knowledge of the upper bound on the number of faulty nodes f, and do not require the knowledge of the number of nodes n. This demonstrates the "power" of the abstract MAC layer, as consensus algorithms in traditional message-passing models require the knowledge of both n and f. Additionally, we show that it is necessary to know f in order to reach consensus. Hence, from this perspective, our algorithms require the minimal knowledge. The lack of knowledge of n brings the challenge of identifying a quorum explicitly, which is a common technique in traditional message-passing algorithms. A key technical novelty of our algorithms is to identify "implicit quorums" which have the necessary information for reaching consensus. The quorums are implicit because nodes do not know the identity of the quorums - such notion is only used in the analysis. 

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3. MCSMARA: A MAC Protocol for RFID Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/RFID64926.2025.11015509  

   Amoah, Bernard; Wang, Xiangyu; Zhang, Jian; Mao, Shiwen; Periaswamy, Senthilkumar CG; Patton, Justin (April 2025, IEEE)

   Dense RFID environments pose critical challenges such as Reader-to-Reader Interference (RRI), Reader-to-Tag Collisions (RTC), and inefficient resource utilization, which degrade system performance and scalability. Traditional Media Access Control (MAC) protocols, including CSMA and TDMA, struggle to address these issues effectively, particularly in dynamic and large-scale deployments. This paper introduces MCSMARA (Markov Decision Process (MDP)-based Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Reader Arbitration), a novel MAC protocol designed to optimize reader coordination in dense RFID networks. By leveraging an MDP framework, MCSMARA models reader state transitions and employs a utility-based arbitration mechanism to dynamically allocate frequencies and time slots. The protocol incorporates adaptive backoff and decentralized neighborhood discovery for efficient resource management without centralized control. Simulation results demonstrate that MCSMARA reduces collisions by up to 30%, improves throughput by 25%, and ensures superior scalability, supporting a large amount of readers with minimal computational overhead. These findings establish MCSMARA as a transformative solution for RFID networks in logistics, retail, and industrial IoT, with potential for extension to mobile and heterogeneous environments. 

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4. On Energy-Delay Tradeoff in Uncoordinated MAC

   https://doi.org/10.1109/Allerton58177.2023.10313356  

   Han, Yuming; Xiong, Zixiang; Host-Madsen, Anders (September 2023, IEEE)
5. MAC Aware Quantization for Distributed Gradient Descent

   https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOBECOM42002.2020.9322254  

   Chang, Wei-Ting; Tandon, Ravi (December 2020, IEEE Globecom)

   null (Ed.)