Z-MAC: Hybrid MAC for Wireless Sensor Networks

Z-MAC has been implemented on NS-2 (version 2.26) as well as the TinyOS platform for sensor networks:

NS-2

Download the source tarball here.
Untar it in the "mac" directory of your ns top-level directory: (NS_INSTALL_DIRECTORY)/ns-2.26/mac. Warning: the package contains a slightly modified version of "mac.h", so if you have made changes to mac.h, please do a diff and incorporate the changes.
Add an entry in the Makefile for zmac files: "mac/common-mac.o mac/zmacHCL.o mac/zmac-timers.o mac/common-mac-timers.o" and remove entries "mac/mac-802_11.o" and "mac/mac-timers.o" for the OBJ_CC target.
Replace (NS_INSTALL_DIRECTORY)/ns-2.26/tcl/lib/ns-mobilenode.tcl with the given file here, the change is very minor, to allow packet tracing from the mac layer.

TDMA Setup

Before using Z-MAC, some setup is required. For a given topology, Z-MAC requires each node to know its TDMA slot. This is achieved using DRAND, a distributed TDMA slot assignment algorithm.
Consider a topology file, new-scen-<N>-<maxX>-<maxY>, which denotes the X, Y and Z positions of nodes in the topology in tcl code. Here maxX and maxY represent the X and Y dimensions of the topology respectively, and N represents the number of nodes in the network. Such a file could be generated by the topology generator 'setdest' for large topologies, or could be hand-written). Note that this naming convention is important later, so please maintain it for the rest of this section.
Run the drand application on this topology by following the execution instructions in the DRAND page above. Save the output in file, "new-scen-N-X-Y.out".
This output file contains the information about the TDMA slots assigned to each node in the topology. We need a script to convert this information to Tcl code which can be input to the z-mac code. This is done by the following script: getZMACInput.py. Execute this script on the output file as follows:

"MAX_NEIGHBOR" is the value of MAX_NEIGHBOR defined in file mac/zmac.h, which defines the maximum number of two-hop neighbors allowed in the topology. The value used here and the value in mac/zmac.h should be the same, or else the program will fail. The current value used is 30.

this will create two files, "new-scen-N-X-Y.drand" and "new-scen-N-X-Y.maxcolor". "new-scen-N-X-Y.drand" contains the slot assignments, and "new-scen-N-X-Y.maxcolor" contains the frame size (which is the maximum slot number assigned to any node in the whole network).

This completes the TDMA setup for Z-MAC. Three files should have been generated:

TRANSMISSION EXPERIMENTS

Now, download the tcl script tarball here
Untar it in any location in your file-system.
The file "simZMAC.tcl" is the main file for the simulation of Z-MAC. Run it as follows:

ns simZMAC.tcl -numsources .... -nn .....
simZMAC.tcl takes a number of arguments, which allow the user to specify different Z-MAC parameters (e.g. To, Tno, LCL/HCL modes, etc.). The specific details can be found in the README file in the tarball.
an output file can be specified as a parameter to simZMAC.tcl, and at the end of the simulation, performance statistics can be printed out.

TinyOS