Several wireless sensor network applications are currently popping up, in various domains. Their goal is often to monitor a geographic area. When a sensor detects a monitored event, it informs a sink node using alarm messages. The area surveillance application needs to react to such an event with a finite, bounded and known delay: these are real-time constraints. The network being linear, routing becomes unnecessary. This work proposes a new real-time MAC protocol with realistic assumptions on sensor networks. We present a formal validation of this protocol, and explicit the worst case times for the services offered by the protocol (initialization and alarm transmission using different modes)
