Time‐aware and energy‐efficient opportunistic routing with residual energy collection in wireless sensor networks

In 1‐dimensional queue wireless sensor networks, how to balance end‐to‐end latency and energy consumption is a challenging problem. However, traditional best path routing and existing opportunistic routing protocols do not address them well because relay hop counts are usually much more, and the link appears more unreliable compared with general mesh topology. In this work, we formulate these 2 problems as a multiobjective optimization problem. Specifically, we first classify network packets into types of time tolerant and time critical and introduce a residual energy collection mechanism of neighboring nodes for forwarder set selection. We then propose a time‐aware and energy‐efficient opportunistic routing protocol (TE‐OR) to optimize energy consumption and to reduce latency for time‐critical packets. We evaluate TE‐OR by different parameters and compare it with existing protocols. The performance results show that TE‐OR achieves a trade‐off between energy consumption and time delay and balances energy consumption among nodes while guaranteeing the latency of time‐critical packets is minimized.     

Ad hoc routing for multilevel power save protocols

Designing energy-efficient protocols for ad hoc networks is important since there has been little improvement in the amount of energy stored on these devices. Previous work considers leaving a subset of nodes in a state with high energy consumption and low latency while the rest of the network remains in a power save state (i.e., low energy consumption and high latency). Our work is the first to generalize this concept for ad hoc networks by proposing the use of k levels of power save, each of which presents a different energy–latency tradeoff (i.e., a lower latency state requires more energy consumption). Thus, previous work only considered the case where k = 1 or k = 2. In this paper, we propose a link layer protocol to provide k levels of power save and a routing protocol to use this link layer effectively. Via simulation, we show that our protocols are able to maintain a desired end-to-end latency with a relatively low energy consumption.     

Distributed self-learning scheduling approach for wireless sensor network

Energy constraints pose great challenges to wireless sensor network (WSN) with battery-powered nodes. But the reduction of energy consumption often introduces additional latency of data delivery. In this paper, a new distributed scheduling approach, self-learning scheduling approach (SSA), is presented in order to reduce energy consumption and to achieve low latency for WSN. This approach, extending the Q-learning method, enables nodes to learn continuous transmission parameter and sleep parameter through interacting with the WSN. We compare SSA with S-MAC protocol and DW-MAC protocol using simulations. The results show that the SSA can make nodes to learn the optimal scheduling policy gradually. The results under different work loads also exhibit that SSA performs much better than S-MAC protocol and DW-MAC protocol in terms of energy consumption and throughput. With regard to latency and maximum queue length, SSA also outperforms the other two MAC protocols in the scenarios, where the collision is serious and the work load is heavy.     

SW-MAC: A Low-Latency MAC Protocol with Adaptive Sleeping for Wireless Sensor Networks

A low duty-cycle operation medium access control (MAC) protocol is very important to conserve energy for resource-constrained wireless sensor networks. Traditional sleep-wake scheduling mechanisms of MAC protocols either require periodic synchronization beacons or bring high end-to-end delivery latency due to the lack of any synchronization. In this paper, we propose a low latency MAC protocol by adjusting the sleep window (SW-MAC) considering traffic patterns. Nodes in SW-MAC transmit a sequence of scout packets to wake up the next hop and estimate the traffic arrival time from upstream nodes to sleep adaptively. For the large variance traffic, we adjust the sleep window using additive increase/multiplicative decrease mechanism. And then we design a scout-based scheduling mechanism with the above algorithms to shorten the delivery latency. Simulation results indicate that SW-MAC could significantly reduce the end-to-end packet delivery latency without sacrificing energy efficiency.     

DEC-MAC: delay- and energy-aware cooperative medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

This paper deals with two critical issues in wireless sensor networks: reducing the end-to-end packet delivery delay and increasing the network lifetime through the use of cooperative communications. Here, we propose a delay- and energy-aware cooperative medium access control (DEC-MAC) protocol, which trades off between the packet delivery delay and a node’s energy consumption while selecting a cooperative relay node. DEC-MAC attempts to balance the energy consumption of the sensor nodes by taking into account a node’s residual energy as part of the relay selection metric, thus increasing the network’s lifetime. The relay selection algorithm exploits the process of elimination and the complementary cumulative distribution function for determining the most optimal relay within the shortest time period. Our numerical analysis demonstrates that the DEC-MAC protocol is able to determine the optimal relay in no more than three mini slots. Our simulation results show that the DEC-MAC protocol improves the end-to-end packet delivery latency and the network lifetime significantly compared to the state-of-the-art protocols, LC-MAC and CoopMAC.     

A Dynamic Adaptation Mechanism for Traffic Conditions in Wireless Sensor Network

As overall network traffic pursue to expand, a lot of low-power medium access control protocols have been proposed to deal with burst traffic in wireless sensor network. Although most of them provide low throughput but do not well optimize the energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) and time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol that arranges nodes into two categories of priority according to their traffic rate and data transmission delay. Nodes that have continuous data should send its data during the contention free period, those one will be classified as low priority and its data will be scheduling using TDMA. Others nodes who have a random data should transmit it immediately during the contention access period (CAP) using a fuzzy logic algorithm, based on their queue length and implemented in the CSMA/CA algorithm. Therefore, the proposed scheme dynamically changes the CAP length to ensure that nodes can complete its transaction during the same super-frame. Simulation results are done using the network simulator tools (NS-2) and have improved good efficiency regarding the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The mechanism has improved the energy consumption, minimised the packet loss probability, increased the throughput variation in the network and also minimised the average end to end delay.     

A New Dynamic Energy Efficient Latency Improving Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In delay sensitive applications of wireless sensor network, it is required to monitor the situation continuously with the sensors. The continuous operation and processing delay, may contribute latency in data communication. This results in more energy consumption of the sensor nodes. It is difficult to replace the battery of a sensor node, after the deployment in the network. The efficient energy management and low latency are the important issues in delay sensitive applications as they affect the life of network. There are some limitations in existing routing protocols as they are particularly designed either for energy efficiency or minimum latency. This paper presents the new protocol to overcome some drawbacks of the existing protocols. A concept of distance metric based routing is explored for shortest routing path selection. This helps to reduce the overhead of the network traffic, which results in improvement of energy efficiency and latency. The simulation results are compared with standard ‘AODV’ routing protocol. It is observed that, this ‘Dynamic Energy Efficient and Latency Improving Protocol’ will be very much suitable for wireless sensor networks in industrial control applications.     

An asynchronous low‐power medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Duty cycling is a fundamental approach used in contention‐based medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to reduce power consumption in sensor nodes. Existing duty cycle‐based MAC protocols use either scheduling or low‐power listening (LPL) to reduce unnecessary energy lost caused by idle listening and overhearing. This paper presents a new asynchronous duty‐cycled MAC protocol for WSN. It introduces a novel dual preamble sampling (DPS) approach to efficiently coordinate channel access among nodes. DPS combines LPL with a short‐strobed preamble approach to significantly reduce the idle‐listening issue in existing asynchronous protocols. We provide detailed analysis of the energy consumption by using well‐known energy models and compare our work with B‐MAC and X‐MAC, two most popular asynchronous duty cycle‐based MAC protocols for WSNs. We also present experimental results based on NS‐2 simulations. We show that depending on the traffic load and preamble length, the proposed MAC protocol improves energy consumption significantly without degrading network performances in terms of delivery ratio and latency. For example, for a traffic rate of 0.1 packets/s and a preamble length of 0.1 s, the average improvement in energy consumption is about 154%. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

无线传感器网络S-MAC协议研究

传感器节点能量受限,节能是传感器网络中媒体访问控制（MAC）协议设计的首要问题。采用周期性睡眠机制、自适应侦听机制、串音避免机制和消息传递机制可使得传感器媒体访问控制（S-MAC）协议在网络能耗和时延方面得到改进。对S-MAC协议的改进主要有两种方式：动态调整、区别控制包与数据包的发送条件进行发送。对无线传感器网络,要想设计出一种满足各方面要求的MAC协议是不现实的,可针对不同应用的要求,灵活采用不同的方式,设计出相应的协议。     

Energy-Efficient Scheduling for Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider the problem of minimizing the energy needed for data fusion in a sensor network by varying the transmission times assigned to different sensor nodes. The optimal scheduling protocol is derived, based on which we develop a low-complexity inverse-log scheduling (ILS) algorithm that achieves near-optimal energy efficiency. To eliminate the communication overhead required by centralized scheduling protocols, we further derive a distributed inverse-log protocol that is applicable to networks with a large number of nodes. Focusing on large-scale networks with high total data rates, we analyze the energy consumption of the ILS. Our analysis reveals how its energy gain over traditional time-division multiple access depends on the channel and the data-length variations among different nodes.     

Rendezvous-based data dissemination for supporting mobile sinks in multi-hop clustered wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, a clustering-based technique is considered as an efficient approach for supporting mobile sinks without using position information. It exploits a Backbone-based Virtual Infrastructure (BVI) which uses only cluster heads (CHs) to construct routing structures. Since sensor nodes have constrained energy and are failure-prone, the effective design of both a clustering structure to construct a BVI and a routing protocol in the BVI is an important issue to achieve energy-efficient and reliable data delivery. However, since previous studies use one-hop clustering for a BVI, they are not robust against node and link failures and thus leading low data delivery ratio. They also use flooding-based routing protocols in a BVI and thus leading high energy consumption. Thus, in this paper, we propose a rendezvous-based data dissemination protocol based on multi-hop clustering (RDDM). Since RDDM uses a multi-hop clustering to provide enough backup sensor nodes to substitute a CH and enough backup paths between neighbor CHs, it can provide high robustness against node and link failures. By using a rendezvous CH, RDDM constructs routing paths from source nodes to mobile sinks without flooding in our BVI and thus can save energy of sensor nodes. By considering movement types of sinks, RDDM finds out a shorter path between a source node and a mobile sink through signaling only between neighbor CHs and thus can reduce the energy consumption. Analysis and simulation results show that RDDM provides better performance than previous protocols in terms of energy consumption and data delivery ratio.     

An Energy-Efficient and Collision-Avoidance MAC Protocol with Pre-scheduling for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose energy efficient MAC protocols for data gathering tree structure. The basic concept of the proposed protocol is that it reduces traffic overloads in low depth nodes by introducing full sleep state for one frame. To maximize network performance, we only control traffic from non-relay nodes which are leaf nodes in the tree. We introduce a new superframe structure for pre-scheduling to alleviate contentions and packet collisions between children nodes. In addition, leaf nodes go into a full sleep mode for one superframe in heavy traffic loads by using control packets, which results in a considerable reduction of energy consumption at low depth nodes. Simulation results show the proposed protocol saves more energy and achieves better packet delivery ratio compared to the DMAC with a moderate increase of a latency performance.     

一种低时延的短波自组网优化链路状态路由协议

优化链路状态路由(Optimized Link State Routing,OLSR)协议是一种先验式路由协议,网络中的所有节点通过周期性地发送控制消息来计算全网路由信息。在短波自组织网络中,节点周期性地发送控制消息会占据大量的信道资源,大幅增加网络的控制开销,浪费短波有限的带宽资源,导致网络通信性能急剧下降。其次,受到地形地貌、天线方向和接收性能的个体差异等影响,造成无线链路不稳定,导致网络中存在非对称链路,增加了通信端到端时延。为此,提出了一种低时延的短波自组网OLSR协议。该协议在执行MPR(Multipoint Relay)选择算法时综合考虑了节点的连接度和链路可靠性,在优化MPR节点个数的同时选择链路可靠性较大的节点作为MPR节点,在进行路由选择时能够利用网络中的非对称链路。仿真结果表明,该协议能优化数据包投递成功率、吞吐量、端到端时延和网络控制开销等性能指标。     

基于QoS的无线传感器网络感知调度协议

针对大规模随机部署传感器网络的节点密度不均匀性和不同应用对事件监测时延的不同需求,为提供全网可调的监测时延保障,设计了面向事件监测应用的全网能耗均衡的自适应分布式感知调度协议(ADSSP),仿真结果表明:相对于随机感知调度协议,ADSSP能获得更低的平均监测时延,在满足相同的平均监测延迟的前提下延长了30%的网络生存时间.     

Cluster Based Routing Protocol for Mobile Nodes in Wireless Sensor Network

Mobility of sensor nodes in wireless sensor network (WSN) has posed new challenges particularly in packet delivery ratio and energy consumption. Some real applications impose combined environments of fixed and mobile sensor nodes in the same network, while others demand a complete mobile sensors environment. Packet loss that occurs due to mobility of the sensor nodes is one of the main challenges which comes in parallel with energy consumption. In this paper, we use cross layer design between medium access control (MAC) and network layers to overcome these challenges. Thus, a cluster based routing protocol for mobile sensor nodes (CBR-Mobile) is proposed. The CBR-Mobile is mobility and traffic adaptive protocol. The timeslots assigned to the mobile sensor nodes that had moved out of the cluster or have not data to send will be reassigned to incoming sensor nodes within the cluster region. The protocol introduces two simple databases to achieve the mobility and traffic adaptively. The proposed protocol sends data to cluster heads in an efficient manner based on received signal strength. In CBR-Mobile protocol, cluster based routing collaborates with hybrid MAC protocol to support mobility of sensor nodes. Schedule timeslots are used to send the data message while the contention timeslots are used to send join registration messages. The performance of proposed CBR-Mobile protocol is evaluated using MATLAB and was observed that the proposed protocol improves the packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, delay and fairness in mobility environment compared to LEACH-Mobile and AODV protocols.     

ECRP: an energy-aware cluster-based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Energy conservation is the main issue in wireless sensor networks. Many existing clustering protocols have been proposed to balance the energy consumption and maximize the battery lifetime of sensor nodes. However, these protocols suffer from the excessive overhead due to repetitive clustering resulting in high-energy consumption. In this paper, we propose energy-aware cluster-based routing protocol (ECRP) in which not only the cluster head (CH) role rotates based on energy around all cluster members until the end of network functioning to avoid frequent re-clustering, but also it can adapt the network topology change. Further, ECRP introduces a multi-hop routing algorithm so that the energy consumption is minimized and balanced. As well, a fault-tolerant mechanism is proposed to cope up with the failure of CHs and relay nodes. We perform extensive simulations on the proposed protocol using different network scenarios. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of ECRP compared with recent and relevant existing protocols in terms of main performance metrics.

     

Actor-oriented directional anycast routing in wireless sensor and actor networks with smart antennas

Current routing protocols in wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) shows a lack of unification for different traffic patterns because the communication for sensor to actor and that for actor to actor are designed separately. Such a design poses a challenge for interoperability between sensors and actors. With the presence of rich-resource actor nodes, we argue that to improve network lifetime, the problem transforms from reducing overall network energy consumption to reducing energy consumption of constrained sensor nodes. To reduce energy consumption of sensor nodes, especially in challenging environments with coverage holes/obstacles, we propose that actor nodes should share forwarding tasks with sensor nodes. To enable such a feature, efficient interoperability between sensors and actors is required, and thus a unified routing protocol for both sensors and actors is needed. This paper explores capabilities of directional transmission with smart antennas and rich-resource actors to design a novel unified actor-oriented directional anycast routing protocol (ADA) which supports arbitrary traffic in WSANs. The proposed routing protocol exploits actors as main routing anchors as much as possible because they have better energy and computing power compared to constraint sensor nodes. In addition, a directional anycast routing approach is also proposed to further reduce total delay and energy consumption of overall network. Through extensive experiments, we show that ADA outperforms state-of-the-art protocols in terms of packet delivery latency, network lifetime, and packet reliability. In addition, by offer fault tolerant features, ADA also performs well in challenging environments where coverage holes and obstacles are of concerns.     

Collision Free Mobility Adaptive (CFMA) MAC for wireless sensor networks

In this paper we propose high throughput collision free, mobility adaptive and energy efficient medium access protocol (MAC) called Collision Free Mobility Adaptive (CFMA) for wireless sensor networks. CFMA ensures that transmissions incur no collisions, and allows nodes to undergo sleep mode whenever they are not transmitting or receiving. It uses delay allocation scheme based on traffic priority at each node and avoids allocating same backoff delay for more than one node unless they are in separate clusters. It also allows nodes to determine when they can switch to sleep mode during operation. CFMA for mobile nodes provides fast association between the mobile node and the cluster coordinator. The proposed MAC performs well in both static and mobile scenarios, which shows its significance over existing MAC protocols proposed for mobile applications. The performance of CFMA is evaluated through extensive simulation, analysis and comparison with other mobility aware MAC protocols. The results show that CFMA outperforms significantly the existing CSMA/CA, Sensor Mac (S-MAC), Mobile MAC (MOB-MAC), Adaptive Mobility MAC (AM-MAC), Mobility Sensor MAC (MS-MAC), Mobility aware Delay sensitive MAC (MD-MAC) and Dynamic Sensor MAC (DS-MAC) protocols including throughput, latency and energy consumption.     

An optimized and power savings protocol for mobility energy-aware in wireless sensor networks

Mobility management in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a complex problem that must be taken into account in all layers of the protocol stack. But this mobility becomes very challenging at the MAC level in order to do not degrade the energy efficiency between sensor nodes that are in communication. However, among medium access protocols, sampling protocols reflect better the dynamics of such scenarios. Nevertheless, the main problem, of such protocols, remains the management of collisions and idle listening between nodes. Previous approaches like B-MAC and X-MAC, based on sampling protocols present some shortcomings. Therefore, we address the mobility issue of WSNs that use as medium access sampling protocols. Firstly, we propose a mobile access solution based on the X-MAC protocol which remains a reference protocol. This protocol, called MoX-MAC, incorporates different mechanisms that enables to mitigate the energy consumption of mobile sensor nodes. Furthermore, we extend our former work (Ba et al. in Proc. of IEEE WMNC, 2011) by evaluating the lifetime of static nodes with respect to MoX-MAC protocol, as well determine the degree of depletion of static nodes due to the presence of mobile nodes.     

A refined MAC protocol with multipacket reception for wireless networks

Medium access control (MAC) protocols making use of multipacket reception (MPR) capability achieve better throughput than conventional MAC protocols. When a wireless network operates with MPR capable nodes and non‐MPR nodes, the MAC protocols must not only utilise the MPR capability to maximise throughput, but must also enable the co‐existence with these two types of nodes. We propose a new MPR MAC protocol to achieve the co‐existence requirement by adopting a request‐to‐send (RTS)/clear‐to‐send (CTS) mechanism in IEEE 802.11 MAC standards. This MPR MAC protocol also improves throughput by allowing additional data transmissions to use the MPR capability fully. We analyse the system throughput of the co‐existence of different link characteristics of nodes, and optimise its throughput by adjusting contention window sizes with respect to certain throughput requirements of the nodes. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.