Opportunistic routing with in-network aggregation for asynchronous duty-cycled wireless sensor networks

We propose an opportunistic routing protocol for wireless sensor networks designed to work on top of an asynchronous duty-cycled MAC. Opportunistic routing can be very effective when used with asynchronous duty-cycled MAC because expected waiting time of senders—when they stay on active mode and transmit packet streams—is significantly reduced. If there are multiple sources, energy consumption can be reduced further through in-network aggregation. The idea proposed in this paper is to temporarily increase duty cycle ratio of nodes holding packets, in order to increase chance of in-network aggregation and thus reduce energy consumption and extend network lifetime. In the proposed protocol called opportunistic routing with in-network aggregation (ORIA), whenever a node generates a packet or receives a packet to forward, it waits for a certain amount of time before transmitting the packet. Meanwhile, the node increases its duty cycle ratio, hoping that it receives packets from other nodes and aggregate them into a single packet. Simulation results show that ORIA saves considerable amount of energy compared to general opportunistic routing protocols, as well as tree-based protocols.     

一种用于水声传感网的MAC层协议

针对分簇的水声传感网,提出了一种基于时分多址（TDMA）的MAC层协议——Cluster-TDMA。该协议主要由规划阶段和传输阶段组成。规划阶段,首先由网关节点规划能造成簇间干扰的子节点的传输,其次由各簇头节点分别规划本簇内其他子节点的传输;传输阶段,子节点根据规划表周期性地向簇头节点发送数据,这些数据最终汇聚到网关节点。该协议简单有效地解决了引起簇间干扰子结点的传输规划问题。C++仿真实验表明,该协议具有良好的吞吐率和能量效率性能。     

Delay-efficient MAC protocol with traffic differentiation and run-time parameter adaptation for energy-constrained wireless sensor networks

This paper presents an asynchronous cascading wake-up MAC protocol for heterogeneous traffic gathering in low-power wireless sensor networks. It jointly considers energy/delay optimization and switches between two modes, according to the traffic type and delay requirements. The first mode is high duty cycle, where energy is traded-off for a reduced latency in presence of realtime traffic (RT). The second mode is low duty cycle, which is used for non-realtime traffic and gives more priority to energy saving. The proposed protocol, DuoMAC, has many features. First, it quietly adjusts the wake-up of a node according to (1) its parent’s wake-up time and, (2) its estimated load. Second, it incorporates a service differentiation through an improved contention window adaptation to meet delay requirements. A comprehensive analysis is provided in the paper to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol in comparison with some state-of-the-art energy-delay efficient duty-cycled MAC protocols, namely DMAC, LL-MAC, and Diff-MAC. The network lifetime and the maximum end-to-end packet latency are adequately modeled, and numerically analyzed. The results show that LL-MAC has the best performance in terms of energy saving, while DuoMAC outperforms all the protocols in terms of delay reduction. To balance the delay/energy objectives, a runtime parameter adaptation mechanism has been integrated to DuoMAC. The mechanism relies on a constrained optimization problem with energy minimization in the objective function, constrained by the delay required for RT. The proposed protocol has been implemented on real motes using MicaZ and TinyOS. Experimental results show that the protocol clearly outperforms LL-MAC in terms of latency reduction, and more importantly, that the runtime parameter adaptation provides additional reduction of the latency while further decreasing the energy cost.     

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.     

A prediction-based asynchronous MAC protocol for heavy traffic load in wireless sensor networks

Radio transceiver often consumes most of energy in a sensor node. To achieve low power consumption, every node periodically schedules its radio transceiver into sleep or active state, which is usually called duty cycle mechanism in MAC protocol. In this paper, we design a novel Prediction-Based Asynchronous MAC protocol (PBA-MAC) for heavy traffic load in wireless sensor networks. PBA-MAC applies an efficient wakeup mechanism to save the energy of a sensor node as much as possible. It reduces communication cost by enabling a sender to predict the intended receiver’s wakeup time, without introducing unnecessary idle listening or overhearing cost. In addition, it introduces an exponential advance mechanism to handle the prediction error caused by clock drift and hardware platform latency. More importantly, its backcast-based retransmission characteristic can efficiently resolve severe wireless collisions caused by concurrent traffic flows. The PBA-MAC is implemented in Contiki operating system. We compare PBA-MAC to some existing energy-efficient MAC protocols. The experimental results show that PBA-MAC significantly improves network energy efficiency and reduces packet delivery latency even under heavy traffic load.     

Using Incompletely Cooperative Game Theory in Wireless Mesh Networks

Recently, game theory has become a useful and powerful tool in research on wireless mesh networks. In this article the authors present a novel concept of incompletely cooperative game theory and use it to improve the performance of MAC protocols in WMNs. In this game, first, each node estimates the current game state (e.g., the number of competing nodes). Second, the node adjusts its equilibrium strategy by tuning its local contention parameters (e.g., the minimum contention window) to the estimated game state. Finally, the game is repeated several times to get the optimal performance. To use the game effectively in WMNs, the authors present a hybrid CSMA/CA protocol by integrating a proposed virtual CSMA/CA and the standard CSMA/CA protocol. When a node has no packet to send, it contends for the channel in virtual CSMA/CA mode. In this way the node can estimate the game state and obtain the optimal strategy. When a node has packets to send, it contends for the channel in standard CSMA/CA mode with the optimal strategy obtained in virtual CSMA/CA mode, switching smoothly from virtual to standard CSMA/CA mode. At the same time, the node keeps adjusting its strategy to the variable game state. In addition, the authors propose a simplified game-theoretic MAC protocol (G-CSMA/CA) by designing an auto degressive backoff mechanism based on the incompletely cooperative game. G-CSMA/CA can easily be implemented in mesh nodes. Finally, simulation results show that the incompletely cooperative game can increase system throughput, decrease delay, jitter, and packet loss rate, and support the game effectively.     

Energy adaptive MAC for wireless sensor networks with RF energy transfer: algorithm,analysis, and implementation

Radio frequency energy transfer (RET) has been proposed as a promising solution to power sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, RET has a significant drawback to be directly applied to WSNs, i.e., unfairness in the achieved throughput among sensor nodes due to the difference of their energy harvesting rates that strongly depend on the distance between the energy emitting node and the energy harvesting nodes. The unfairness problem should be properly taken into account to mitigate the drawback caused from the features of RET. To resolve this issue, in this paper, we propose a medium access control (MAC) protocol for WSNs based on RET with two distinguishing features: energy adaptive (EA) duty cycle management that adaptively manages the duty cycle of sensor nodes according to their energy harvesting rates and EA contention algorithm that adaptively manages contentions among sensor nodes considering fairness. Through analysis and simulation, we show that our MAC protocol works well under the RET environment. Finally, to show the feasibility of WSNs with RET, we test our MAC protocol with a prototype system in a real environment.     

Impact of MAC frame length on energy efficiency in 6LowPAN

To reach necessary end-to-end connectivity between the Internet and wireless sensor networks （WSNs）, the Internet Engineering Task Force （IETF） IPv6 over low power wireless personal area network （6LowPAN） working group has been established and introduced an adaptation layer for integration of IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer/media access control （PHY/MAC） layers and the upper layers of any Intemet protocol （IP）-based networks, such as the Internet. The energy efficiency is one of the most important performance measures in WSNs because most sensor nodes are only battery powered so we should reduce the energy consumption to the lowest to extend the life of nodes. Therefore the determination of MAC frame length should be carefully considered since that the radio frequency （RF） module consumes most the energy of a sensor node meanwhile the MAC protocol is the direct controller of RF module. In this paper, we provide a star-shaped 6LowPAN non-beacon mode with unslotted carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance （CSMA/CA） mechanism to access to the channel and model the stochastic behavior of a target end node as the M/G/1 queuing system. Analytical expressions for some parameters such as channel busy probability, packet loss probability and energy efficiency are obtained in this paper and our analytical results can clearly show the impact of MAC frame length on the energy efficiency of a target node in both ideal and lossy channel.     

An average velocity-based routing protocol with low end-to-end delay for wireless sensor networks

To reduce energy consumption, in most MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks, listen-sleep cycles are adopted. However, even though it is a good solution for energy efficiency, it may introduce a large end-to-end delay due to sleep delay, since a node with a packet to transmit should wait until the next-hop node of the packet awakes. To resolve this issue, in this paper, we propose the Average Velocity-Based Routing (AVR) protocol for wireless sensor networks that aims at reducing the end-toend delay. The AVR protocol is a kind of a geographic routing protocol that considers both location of a node and waiting time of a packet at the MAC layer. When a node can use information of n-hop away neighbor nodes, it calculates the n-hop average velocity for each of its one-hop neighbor nodes and forwards a packet to the neighbor node that has the highest n-hop average velocity. Simulation results show that as the knowledge range, n, increases, the average end-to-end delay decreases.     

A pseudo-random asynchronous duty cycle MAC protocol in wireless sensor networks

We propose a pseudo-random asynchronous duty cycle MAC protocol in wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol adopts a hash function to determine the next wake-up times. As the next wake-up times are known in advance, the sensor nodes do not need to remain active until their intended receivers wake up. Given an end-to-end delay requirement, the proposed protocol significantly decreases energy consumption by reducing the idle listening time.     

RPCP‐MAC: Receiver preambling with channel polling MAC protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks

To design a reliable and energy efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) is an active research area due to its variety of applications. There are many issues associated with underwater acoustic channels including long and variable propagation delay, attenuation, and limited bandwidth which pose significant challenges in the design of MAC protocol. The available sender‐initiated asynchronous preamble‐based MAC protocols for UWSNs are not reliable and energy‐efficient. This is due to the problems caused by transmission of preambles for longer duration and collision of preambles from hidden nodes in sender‐initiated preamble‐based MAC protocols. To resolve these issues, the paper proposed an asynchronous receiver‐initiated preamble‐based MAC protocol named Receiver Preambling with Channel Polling MAC (RPCP‐MAC) protocol for shallow underwater monitoring applications with high data rates. The protocol is proposed to resolve data packet collision and support reliability in an energy‐efficient way without using any transmission schedule. The proposed protocol is based on the following mechanisms. Firstly, receiver preambling mechanism is adopted to reduce idle listening. Secondly, channel polling mechanism is used to determine missing data frame during its sleeping period and to minimize the active time of node and reduces energy wastage. Finally, a back‐off mechanism is applied to resolve collision when preambles are received simultaneously. In addition, performance analysis through Markov chain together with its validation with simulation‐based studies is reported in the paper. Both the analytical and simulation results have demonstrated the reliability achievable with RPCP‐MAC while providing good energy efficiency.     

A new load balancing and data collection algorithm for energy saving in wireless sensor networks

Data gathering is a major function of many applications in wireless sensor networks. The most important issue in designing a data gathering algorithm is how to save energy of sensor nodes while meeting the requirements of special applications or users. Wireless sensor networks are characterized by centralized data gathering, multi-hop communication and many to one traffic pattern. These three characteristics can lead to severe packet collision, network congestion and packet loss, and even result in hot-spots of energy consumption thus causing premature death of sensor nodes and entire network. In this paper, we propose a load balance data gathering algorithm that classifies sensor nodes into different layers according to their distance to sink node and furthermore, divides the sense zone into several clusters. Routing trees are established between sensor node and sink depending on the energy metric and communication cost. For saving energy consumption, the target of data aggregation scheme is adopted as well. Analysis and simulation results show that the algorithm we proposed provides more uniform energy consumption among sensor nodes and can prolong the lifetime of sensor networks.     

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.     

HEED: a hybrid, energy-efficient, distributed clustering approach for ad hoc sensor networks

Topology control in a sensor network balances load on sensor nodes and increases network scalability and lifetime. Clustering sensor nodes is an effective topology control approach. We propose a novel distributed clustering approach for long-lived ad hoc sensor networks. Our proposed approach does not make any assumptions about the presence of infrastructure or about node capabilities, other than the availability of multiple power levels in sensor nodes. We present a protocol, HEED (Hybrid Energy-Efficient Distributed clustering), that periodically selects cluster heads according to a hybrid of the node residual energy and a secondary parameter, such as node proximity to its neighbors or node degree. HEED terminates in O(1) iterations, incurs low message overhead, and achieves fairly uniform cluster head distribution across the network. We prove that, with appropriate bounds on node density and intracluster and intercluster transmission ranges, HEED can asymptotically almost surely guarantee connectivity of clustered networks. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed approach is effective in prolonging the network lifetime and supporting scalable data aggregation.     

PRIN: A Priority-Based Energy Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks Varying the Sample Inter-Arrival Time

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used in a variety of applications to sense and transfer information to the centralized node with energy efficiency increasing the network’s lifespan. Other factors, such as quality of service (QoS) is also important to improve the performance of the WSNs, by increasing throughput and reducing end-to-end delay. In this paper, we evaluate the importance of QoS in the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for WSNs using different metrics and parameters such as energy efficiency, throughput, delay, and the network lifespan. We propose a new QoS MAC protocol, “PRIority in Node” (PRIN), using static priority in the source and the intermediate node and priority among the node which is one hop from the sink node to achieve QoS in WSNs. Simulation results are compared with those of the synchronous MAC protocol in terms of QoS parameters to show the improved performance of the proposed MAC protocol.     

Adaptive Load-Aware Congestion Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Congestion control in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is crucial. In this article, we discuss congestion control and the adaptive load-aware problem for sensor nodes in WSNs. When the traffic load of a specific node exceeds its the available capacity of the node, a congestion problem occurs because of buffer memory overflow. Congestion may cause serious problems such as packet loss, the consumption of power, and low network throughput for sensor nodes. To address these problems, we propose a distributed congestion control protocol called adaptive load-aware congestion control protocol (ALACCP). The protocol can adaptively allocate the appropriate forwarding rate for jammed sensor nodes to mitigate the congestion load. Through the buffer management mechanism, the congestion index of neighboring sensor nodes, and an adjustment of the adaptive forwarding rate, the degree of congestion is alleviated markedly. The performance in allocating the forwarding rate effectively to neighboring sensor nodes also improves. The ALACCP can avoid packet loss because of traffic congestion, reduce the power consumption of nodes, and improve the network throughput. Simulation results revealed that the proposed ALACCP can effectively improve network performance and maintain the fairness of networks.     

The Classification Performance of a Three-Product Cyclone

Providing successful data collection in transmitter-initiated wireless sensor networks with mobile Sink (WSN-MS) scenarios is a primary goal of a myriad of critical applications in real world. Unfortunately, the problem of broken links which may occur during data transmission between a source node and a mobile Sink may cause inevitably incomplete data collection. To overcome this challenging issue, we propose in this paper a seamless handover mechanism performed on asynchronous duty cycled MAC protocol on the basis of neighborhood information. By measuring continuously the signal quality of ACKnowledgment messages of transmitted Data during a 1-hop communication, this mechanism allows the source node to continue transmitting data to the mobile Sink using a suitable neighbor node as relay in the case where the Sink node leaves the radio range in direction of that neighbor node. The asynchronous protocol XMAC (without handover) has been chosen as a basic protocol on which we designed our contribution named HXMAC (XMAC with handover). The later was implemented and evaluated using a powerful simulation tool. Experimental results based on the comparison between HXMAC and XMAC clearly showed that handover mechanism is a suitable technique to promote significantly reliability in WSN-MS data collection operation.     

Asynchronous failed sensor node detection method for sensor networks

Detecting failed nodes is important in a sensor network, because a failed node can cause coverage and connectivity holes. Since sensors are resource‐limited devices, lack of a clocking mechanism imposes difficulties in implementing synchronous failure detection techniques. To counter this, asynchronous methods are needed for detecting failed sensor nodes. For example, in traditional distributed systems sent data packets and received acknowledgements are matched to identify any malfunctions. A similar approach can be adopted in sensor networks. An asynchronous failed sensor node detection (AFSD) method is proposed, where a numeric counter variable is used to track the received and sent data packets between active nodes. This variable acts as bounded for an active sensor node and unbounded for an out‐of‐communication or failed node. By observing the value of the counter, a decision can be made on a deployed sensor node. Whenever the counter value of a neighbour crosses a predefined threshold, that neighbour is suspected. However, measuring a counter value can always lead to a false positive. To avoid false suspicion, a consensus protocol is needed. Such a technique is described, which is proved as accurate and complete. The complexity analysis shows that the control, energy, and time overheads of the proposed method are linear and in the order of number of neighbours per node. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Energy‐Efficient Quorum‐Based MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The reliability of sensor networks is generally dependent on the battery power of the sensor nodes that it employs; hence it is crucial for the sensor nodes to efficiently use their battery resources. This research paper presents a method to increase the reliability of sensor nodes by constructing a connected dominating tree (CDT), which is a subnetwork of wireless sensor networks. It detects the minimum number of dominatees, dominators, forwarder sensor nodes, and aggregates, as well as transmitting data to the sink. A new medium access control (MAC) protocol, called Homogenous Quorum‐Based Medium Access Control (HQMAC), is also introduced, which is an adaptive, homogenous, asynchronous quorum‐based MAC protocol. In this protocol, certain sensor nodes belonging to a network will be allowed to tune their wake‐up and sleep intervals, based on their own traffic load. A new quorum system, named BiQuorum, is used by HQMAC to provide a low duty cycle, low network sensibility, and a high number of rendezvous points when compared with other quorum systems such as grid and dygrid. Both the theoretical results and the simulation results proved that the proposed HQMAC (when applied to a CDT) facilitates low transmission latency, high delivery ratio, and low energy consumption, thus extending the lifetime of the network it serves.     

A cluster-based power-efficient MAC scheme for event-driven sensing applications

In developing an architecture for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that is extensible to hundreds of thousands of heterogeneous nodes, fundamental advances in energy efficient communication protocols must occur. In this paper, we first propose an energy-efficient and robust intra-cluster communication bit-map assisted (BMA) MAC protocol for large-scale cluster-based WSNs and then derive energy models for BMA, conventional TDMA, and energy efficient TDMA (E-TDMA) using two different approaches. We use simulation to validate these analytical models. BMA is intended for event-driven sensing applications, that is, sensor nodes forward data to the cluster head only if significant events are observed. It has low complexity and utilizes a dynamic scheduling scheme. Clustering is a promising distributing technique used in large-scale WSNs, and when combined with an appropriate MAC scheme, high energy efficiency can be achieved. The results indicate that BMA can improve the performance of wireless sensor networks by reducing energy expenditure and packet latency. The performance of BMA as an intra-cluster MAC scheme relative to E-TDMA depends on the sensor node traffic offer load and several other key system parameters. For most sensor-based applications, the values of these parameters can be constrained such that BMA provides enhanced performance.