On combining network coding with duty-cycling in flood-based wireless sensor networks

Network coding and duty-cycling are two major techniques for saving energy in wireless sensor networks. To the best of our knowledge, the idea to combine these two techniques for even more aggressive energy savings, has not been explored. This is not unusual, since these two techniques achieve energy efficiency through conflicting means, e.g., network coding saves energy by exploiting overhearing (i.e., nodes are awake), whereas duty-cycling saves energy by reducing idle listening (i.e., nodes sleep). In this article, we thoroughly investigate if network coding and duty cycling can be used together for more aggressive energy savings in flood-based wireless sensor networks.Our main idea is to exploit the redundancy sometimes present in flooding applications that use network coding, and put a node to sleep (i.e., duty cycle) when a redundant transmission takes place (i.e., the node has already received and successfully decoded a sequence of network-coded packets). We propose a scheme, called DutyCode, in which a multiple access control (MAC) protocol implements packet streaming and allows the network coding-aware application to decide when a node can sleep. We also present an algorithm for deciding the optimal coding scheme for a node to further reduce energy consumption by minimizing redundant packet transmissions. Finally, we propose an adaptive switching technique between DutyCode and an existing duty-cycling MAC protocol. We investigate our proposed solutions analytically and implement them on mote hardware. Our performance evaluation results, obtained from a 42-node indoor testbed, show that our scheme saves 30–46% more energy than network coding-based solutions.     

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.     

ADV-MAC: Analysis and optimization of energy efficiency through data advertisements for wireless sensor networks

Several Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks with the objective of minimizing energy consumption. For example, Sensor-MAC (S-MAC) was proposed to reduce energy consumption by introducing a duty cycle. However, S-MAC cannot handle variable loads because of its static duty cycle. Timeout-MAC (T-MAC) introduced an adaptive duty cycle to handle variable traffic loads. However, nodes that do not take part in data exchange waste energy because of continuous renewal of their timeout values. To eliminate this energy waste, we propose ADV-MAC, a MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks that introduces the concept of advertising for data contention. ADV-MAC minimizes the energy lost in idle listening while maintaining an adaptive duty cycle to handle variable loads. Additionally, ADV-MAC enables energy efficient MAC-level multicasting. We derive an analytical model for the packet delivery ratio and the energy consumption of the protocol. We verify the analytical model with simulations and use the model to choose an optimal value of the advertisement period. Simulations show that the optimized ADV-MAC provides substantial energy gains (50–70% less than T-MAC and S-MAC for the scenarios investigated) while faring as well as T-MAC in terms of packet delivery ratio and latency.     

基于SMAC的无线传感器网络MAC协议的分析与优化

首先对MAC协议进行了相关介绍。然后重点介绍了一种基于竞争的无线传感器网络MAC层协议S-MAC协议。其核心是提出了一种新的无线传感器网络的MAC协议设计方案。基于动态调整占空比的思想,提出了ATC-SMAC协议。该协议在S-MAC协议的基础上改进了固定占空比的劣势,根据每个节点上的数据包的平均延迟调整占空比。通过动态地调整每个节点的占空比,使不同流量的节点拥有不同的工作时间,协议根据不同节点的流量情况自适应地对其占空比进行调整。经过仿真试验,得到ATC-MAC在网络端对端延迟、能量消耗以及吞吐量方面较S-MAC协议都有比较明显的提高。     

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.     

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.     

无线传感器网络S-MAC协议的能耗改进

无线传感器节点由于能量的耗尽而失效或者废弃,造成相应监测区域的空白,能耗问题一直是传感器网络介质访问控制（MAC）协议研究的重点问题之一。在S-MAC协议采用周期性侦听和睡眠机制、自适应侦听机制等方式改善网络能耗的基础上提出选择性睡眠、动态调整占空比、发送功率控制三种改进方法。通过NS2仿真实验,改进后S-MAC协议的能耗明显得到优化。     

Energy efficiency of large-scale wireless networks: proactive versus reactive networking

An analytical approach to the characterization of energy consumption of large-scale wireless networks is presented. The radio model includes energy consumption of nodes at various operating states. We analyze the total energy consumption of the proactive and the reactive networking strategies, taking into account transmitting, listening, and sleeping energy. Scaling laws with respect to the increase of node density and geographical size are derived. Energy efficiency and overhead at the physical and the network layers are evaluated against message duty cycle, channel fading rate, and node mobility. The crossover point in message duty cycle below which reactive network has assured advantages is obtained. The analysis is then applied to large-scale sensor networks for applications involving data-centric and location-centric queries. The ad hoc sensor network architecture is compared with sensor networks with mobile access points.     

A Massive Transmission Scheme in Contention-Based MAC for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

For transmitting the data which is composed of sensed information in sensors, wireless sensor networks have been developed and researched for the improvement of energy efficiency, hence, many MAC protocols in WSN employ the duty cycle mechanism. Since the progressed development of the low power transceiver and processor let the high energy efficiency come true, the delivery of the multimedia data which occurs in the area of sensor work should be needed to provide supplemental information. In this paper, we design a new scheme for massive transmission of large multimedia data where the duty cycle is used in contention based MAC protocol, for WMSN. The proposed scheme can be applied into the previous duty cycle mechanism because it provides two operations between normal operation and massive transmission operation. Measuring the status of the buffer in a sender and the condition of current radio channel can be criteria for the decision of the above two operations. This paper shows the results of the experiment by performing the simulation. The target protocol of the experiment is X-MAC which is contention-based MAC protocol for WSN. Two approaches, both X-MAC which operates only duty cycle mechanism and X-MAC(MTS) which operates combined massive transmission scheme, are used for the comparative.     

Review of Energy Conservation Using Duty Cycling Schemes for IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

Energy conservation is one of the crucial issues in wireless sensor network (WSN). A significant solution to conserve energy is done by deploying duty cycle management mechanisms in the WSN applications. This paper reviews several duty cycle mechanisms in WSN such as Duty Cycle Learning Algorithm, adaptive media access control (MAC) protocol for efficient IEEE 802.15.4 (AMPE), distributed duty cycle management (DDCM), distributed duty cycle management low power broadcast (DDCM + LPB) and distributed beacon only period. These mechanisms change their parameters such as idle listening, packet accumulation and delay in the end device transmitting queue to improve the energy conservation in WSN. The performances of these different energy conservation mechanisms have been compared at the MAC layer of IEEE 802.15.4 standard. It is found that the DDCM + LPB has made approximately 100 % enhancement in terms of average energy efficiency as compared to the other mechanisms. DDCM + LPB has significant enhancements by adapting the duty cycle according to the network traffic load condition. Using this mechanism, the duty cycle is increased when the traffic load increases and vice versa. Its energy efficiency also outperforms the conventional DDCM by the average of 10 %.     

Range extension cooperative MAC to attack energy hole in duty-cycled multi-hop WSNs

Effective techniques for extending lifetime in multi-hop wireless sensor networks include duty cycling and, more recently introduced, cooperative transmission (CT) range extension. However, a scalable MAC protocol has not been presented that combines both. An On-demand Scheduling Cooperative MAC protocol (OSC-MAC) is proposed to address the energy hole problem in multi-hop wireless sensor networks (WSNs). By combining an on-demand strategy and sensor cooperation intended to extend range, OSC-MAC tackles the spatio-temporal challenges for performing CT in multi-hop WSNs: cooperating nodes are neither on the same duty cycle nor are they necessarily in the same collision domain. We use orthogonal and pipelined duty-cycle scheduling, in part to reduce traffic contention, and devise a reservation-based wake-up scheme to bring cooperating nodes into temporary synchrony to support CT range extension. The efficacy of OSC-MAC is demonstrated using extensive NS-2 simulations for different network scenarios without and with mobility. Compared with existing MAC protocols, simulation results show that while we explicitly account for the overhead of CT and practical failures of control packets in dense traffic, OSC-MAC still gives 80–200 % lifetime improvement.     

带休眠算法的无线传感器网络MAC协议

由于无线传感器网络中每个传感器节点的能量有限,所以需要有效的MAC协议来保持能量的高效利用。在MAC协议中引入休眠算法是其中一种重要的节能方式。现有的带休眠算法的无线传感器网络MAC协议已有很多种,主要分为2大类:一类是以S-MAC协议为代表的基于休眠/监听排程方案来达到节能目的的MAC协议;另一类是以WiseMAC为代表的基于低功率信道检测方案的MAC协议。对现有的主要几种有代表性的带休眠算法的无线传感器网络MAC协议进行了描述,分析了它们各自的优缺点,并进行了对比和总结。     

An energy‐efficient asynchronous wake‐up scheme for underwater acoustic sensor networks

In addition to the requirements of the terrestrial sensor network where performance metrics such as throughput and packet delivery delay are often emphasized, energy efficiency becomes an even more significant and challenging issue in underwater acoustic sensor networks, especially when long‐term deployment is required. In this paper, we tackle the problem of energy conservation in underwater acoustic sensor networks for long‐term marine monitoring applications. We propose an asynchronous wake‐up scheme based on combinatorial designs to minimize the working duty cycle of sensor nodes. We prove that network connectivity can be properly maintained using such a design even with a reduced duty cycle. We study the utilization ratio of the sink node and the scalability of the network using multiple sink nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed asynchronous wake‐up scheme can effectively reduce the energy consumption for idle listening and can outperform other cyclic difference set‐based wake‐up schemes. More significantly, high performance is achieved without sacrificing network connectivity. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Medium reservation based sensor MAC protocol for low latency and high energy efficiency

In this paper, we present a new MAC protocol satisfying with both high energy efficiency and low transmission latency at the same time over wireless sensor network, named as medium reservation preamble based MAC (MRPM). Unlike other synchronized duty cycle MACs, MRPM does not have separate time frames for SYNC and data traffics. Both traffics are integrated in a short listen period. Also, the channel contention is excluded from listen period and transferred to new period called contention period. The contention period precedes the listen period, and only transmitters wake up in this contention period and contend for medium reservation, whereas non-transmitters bypass it. These approaches enable MRPM to achieve adaptive duty cycle and quite short listen period. Moreover, MRPM uses carrier sensing information for advanced adaptive listening which makes packets to travel multiple hops away in a single sleep/listen cycle. The simulation results verify that MRPM has features of high energy efficiency and low latency.     

A Low Duty Cycle MAC Protocol for Directional Wireless Sensor Networks

Directional communication in wireless sensor networks minimizes interference and thereby increases reliability and throughput of the network. Hence, directional wireless sensor networks (DWSNs) are fastly attracting the interests of researchers and industry experts around the globe. However, in DWSNs the conventional medium access control protocols face some new challenges including the synchronization among the nodes, directional hidden terminal and deafness problems, etc. For taking the advantages of spatial reusability and increased coverage from directional communications, a low duty cycle directional Medium Access control protocol for mobility based DWSNs, termed as DCD-MAC, is developed in this paper. To reduce energy consumption due to idle listening, duty cycling is extensively used in WSNs. In DCD-MAC, each pair of parent and child sensor nodes performs synchronization with each other before data communication. The nodes in the network schedule their time of data transmissions in such a way that the number of collisions occurred during transmissions from multiple nodes is minimized. The sensor nodes are kept active only when the nodes need to communicate with each other. The DCD-MAC exploits localized information of mobile nodes in a distributed manner and thus it gives weighted fair access of transmission slots to the nodes. As a final point, we have studied the performance of our proposed protocol through extensive simulations in NS-3 and the results show that the DCD-MAC gives better reliability, throughput, end-to-end delay, network lifetime and overhead comparing to the related directional MAC protocols.     

基于GAF的无线传感器网络MAC协议

节能是无线传感器网络介质访问控制(MAC)协议的首要目标,综合近年来MAC协议的研究成果,针对S-MAC、T-MAC等几种典型协议进行分析,研究出将拓扑结构控制机制引入MAC协议,可进一步降低能耗。给出了一种基于GAF拓扑控制思想的MAC协议、GS-MAC协议。GS-MAC协议可以降低处于空闲侦听状态的节点数量,是一种高效节能的协议。仿真表明,引入拓扑控制后可以达到进一步节约能耗的目的。     

Reinforcement Learning for Multiple Access Control in Wireless Sensor Networks: Review, Model, and Open Issues

Wireless sensor networking is a viable communication technology among low-cost and energy-limited sensor nodes deployed in an environment. Due to high operational features, the application area of this technology is extended significantly but with some energy related challenges. One main cause of the nodes energy wasting in these networks is idle listening characterized with no communication activity. This drawback can be mitigated by the means of energy-efficient multiple access control schemes so as to minimize idle listening. In this paper, we discuss the applicability of distributed learning algorithms namely reinforcement learning towards multiple access control (MAC) in wireless sensor networks. We perform a comparative review of relevant work in the literature and then present a cooperative multi agent reinforcement learning framework for MAC design in wireless sensor networks. Accordingly, the paper concludes with some major challenges and open issues of distributed MAC design using reinforcement learning.     

Energy efficient TDMA-based MAC protocol associated with GAF for wireless sensor networks

The design of media access control (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with the idea of cross layer attracts more and more attention. People can improve the MAC protocol by obtaining certain information regarding the network layer and physical layer. This article synthesizes and optimizes certain cross-layer protocols which have existed. On the basis of the routing, topology information in the network layer, and transmission power information in the physical layer, the time slot assignment algorithm has been improved in the MAC layer. By using geographical adaptive fidelity algorithm (GAF) to divide the grids, controlling of transmission power and scheduling the work/sleep duty cycle for sensor nodes, a new MAC protocol has been proposed to decrease energy consumption and enlarge the lifetime of WSNs. Simulation results show that the MAC protocol functions well.     

Towards a classification of energy aware MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks

Power management is an important issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) because wireless sensor nodes are usually battery powered, and an efficient use of the available battery power becomes an important concern specially for those applications where the system is expected to operate for long durations. This necessity for energy efficient operation of a WSN has prompted the development of new protocols in all layers of the communication stack. Provided that, the radio transceiver is the most power consuming component of a typical sensor node, large gains can be achieved at the link layer where the medium access control (MAC) protocol controls the usage of the radio transceiver unit. MAC protocols for sensor networks differ greatly from typical wireless networks access protocols in many issues. MAC protocols for sensor networks must have built‐in power conservation, mobility management, and failure recovery strategies. Furthermore, sensor MAC protocols should make performance trade‐off between latency and throughput for a reduction in energy consumption to maximize the lifetime of the network. This is in general achieved through duty cycling the radio transceiver. Many MAC protocols with different objectives were proposed for wireless sensor networks in the literature. Most of these protocols take into account the energy efficiency as a main objective. There is much more innovative work should be done at the MAC layer to address the hard unsolved problems. In this paper, we first outline and discuss the specific requirements and design trade‐offs of a typical wireless sensor MAC protocol by describing the properties of WSN that affect the design of MAC layer protocols. Then, a typical collection of wireless sensor MAC protocols presented in the literature are surveyed, classified, and described emphasizing their advantages and disadvantages whenever possible. Finally, we present research directions and identify open issues for future medium access research. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

SyncWUF: An Ultra Low-Power MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, power consumption is one of the key design issues because a large number of sensor nodes are powered by cheap batteries. Switching the RF transceiver, which is one of the biggest power consumers in a sensor node, to low-power sleep mode as much as possible has been proven to be a very efficient way to save power with a factor of tens or even hundreds. So far, several schemes have been proposed to reduce the duty cycle of the RF transceiver by MAC layer scheduling. Among them, the wake-up-frame scheme and the WiseMAC are two very efficient protocols based on the so-called preamble sampling technology. This paper proposes combining these two schemes to obtain a further optimized low-power MAC protocol, called SyncWUF, for low-traffic wireless sensor network. Analytical and simulation results prove that our proposal achieves significant battery lifetime gain in different application cases without negatively affecting other important system parameters such as channel capacity and latency