nW-MAC: multiple wake-up provisioning in asynchronously scheduled duty cycle MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

To reduce the energy cost of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the duty cycle (i.e., periodic wake-up and sleep) concept has been used in several medium access control (MAC) protocols. Although these protocols are energy efficient, they are primarily designed for low-traffic environments and therefore sacrifice delay in order to maximize energy conservation. However, many applications having both low and high traffic demand a duty cycle MAC that is able to achieve better energy utilization with minimum energy loss ensuring delay optimization for timely and effective actions. In this paper, nW-MAC is proposed; this is an asynchronously scheduled and multiple wake-up provisioned duty cycle MAC protocol for WSNs. The nW-MAC employs an asynchronous rendezvous schedule selection technique to provision a maximum of n wake-ups in the operational cycle of a receiver. The proposed MAC is suitable to perform in both low- and high-traffic applications using a reception window-based medium access with a specific RxOp. Furthermore, per cycle multiple wake-up concept ensures optimum energy consumption and delay maintaining a higher throughput, as compare to existing mechanisms. Through analysis and simulations, we have quantified the energy-delay performance and obtained results that expose the effectiveness of nW-MAC.     

无线传感器网络环境下基于事件 驱动应用的节能TDMA协议

媒质接入控制是无线传感器网络设计的关键问题之一.由于媒质接入控制协议直接控制着节点无线通信模块的活动,而无线通信模块是传感器节点能量消耗的主要来源,因此MAC协议节能效率的好坏将严重影响网络的性能.基于TDMA的MAC协议具有固有的节能特性,即通过合理的TDMA调度避免传输碰撞以及减少节点空闲监听的时间.本文提出了ED-TDMA协议,一种面向事件驱动的传感器网络应用的TDMA协议.该协议根据当前源节点的数目动态地改变TDMA帧的长度,提高了信道利用率;同时采用位图方式的TDMA调度,极大地减少了TDMA调度的开销,节约了能量.此外,通过引入簇内覆盖的思想,使得簇内的活动节点数目为一常数,同时减少了工作节点的数目,从而延长网络的生命周期,并在一定程度上提高了系统的可伸缩性.实验结果显示,ED-TDMA协议更适用于网络负载较低、节点密度高的无线传感器网络.     

FPS‐MAC: Fuzzy priority scheduling‐based MAC protocol for intelligent monitoring systems

Recent advances in microelectronics have encouraged the implementation of a wireless sensor network (WSN) in intelligent monitoring systems (IMSs). The IMS for time‐critical applications requires timely and reliable data delivery without sacrificing the energy efficiency of the network. This paper proposes FPS‐MAC, a fuzzy priority scheduling‐based medium access control protocol, designed for event critical traffic in hierarchical WSN. The FPS‐MAC allows time‐critical event traffic to opportunistically steal the data slots allocated for periodic data traffic in event‐based situations. Additionally, a fuzzy logic‐based slot scheduling mechanism is introduced to provide guaranteed and timely medium access to emergency traffic load and ensures the quality‐of‐service (QoS) requirements of IMSs. Both analytical and simulation results for data throughput, energy consumption, and transmission delay of FPS‐MAC, TLHA, E‐BMA, and BMA‐RR have been analyzed to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed FPS‐MAC protocol.     

Aggregated traffic flow weight controlled hierarchical MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

It has been discussed in the literature that the medium-access control (MAC) protocols, which schedule periodic sleep–active states of sensor nodes, can increase the longevity of sensor networks. However, these protocols suffer from very low end-to-end throughput and increased end-to-end packet delay. How to design an energy-efficient MAC protocol that greatly minimizes the packet delay while maximizing the achievable data delivery rate, however, remains unanswered. In this paper, motivated by the many-to-one multihop traffic pattern of sensor networks and the heterogeneity in required data packet rates of different events, we propose an aggregated traffic flow weight controlled hierarchical MAC protocol (ATW-HMAC). We find that ATW-HMAC significantly decreases the packet losses due to collisions and buffer drops (i.e., mitigates the congestion), which helps to improve network throughput, energy efficiency, and end-to-end packet delay. ATW-HMAC is designed to work with both single-path and multipath routing. Our analytical analysis shows that ATW-HMAC provides weighted fair rate allocation and energy efficiency. The results of our extensive simulation, done in ns-2.30, show that ATW-HMAC outperforms S-MAC; traffic-adaptive medium access; and SC-HMAC.     

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 %.     

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 Slotted-FAMA based MAC Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks with Data Train

Underwater wireless sensor networks are significantly different from terrestrial wireless sensor networks in that sound is mainly used as the communication medium. The limited bandwidth, long propagation delay and high bit error rate pose great challenges in Media Access Control (MAC) protocol design for underwater wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a Slotted-FAMA based MAC protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks with data train, called SFAMA-DT. It improves the channel utilization by forming a train of data packets of multiple transmission pairs during each round of simultaneously handshakes, which overcomes the multiple RTS attempts problem of Slotted-FAMA in high traffic environments and greatly reduces the relative proportion of time wasted due to the propagation delays of control packets. Our simulations show that the SFAMA-DT is able to achieve much higher throughput than the Slotted-FAMA protocol.     

Monitoring power transmission lines using a wireless sensor network

Power transmission is the bulk transfer of electrical energy from power plants to sub‐stations. A wireless sensor network is a promising technology for transmission line monitoring due to its low cost, easy installation, large‐scale coverage, and fault tolerance characteristics. A wireless sensor network is application‐specific; therefore, we investigate the new features and requirements of the wireless sensor network used in transmission line monitoring. Then, we propose an efficient wireless sensor network framework, which includes a clustering algorithm to simplify network management and to balance the network's energy consumption and a hybrid media access control (MAC) (H‐MAC) protocol to handle traffic variability. The framework takes advantage of the features of network topology and traffic pattern to optimize the protocols' performance on real time and energy efficiency. The results indicate that the H‐MAC shows a significant improvement in the network's reliability, real‐time performance, and energy efficiency, and the cluster hierarchy can balance the network's energy consumption. Furthermore, the cluster hierarchy also prolongs the network's lifetime. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

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.     

An Application Oriented Power Saving MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency has been an important concern in wireless sensor networks where Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol plays an important role. However, current MAC protocols designed for energy saving have seldom considered multiple applications coexisting in WSN with variation of traffic load dynamics. In this paper, we propose an adaptive control algorithm at MAC layer to promote energy efficiency. We focus on the tradeoff relation between collisions and control overhead as a reflection of traffic load and propose to balance the tradeoff under the constraints of QoS options. We integrate the algorithm into S-MAC and verify it through NS-2 platform. The simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves observable improvement in energy performance while meeting QoS requirement for different coexisting applications in comparison with S-MAC.     

A hybrid reservation-based MAC protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks

Due to the characteristics of underwater acoustic channel, such as long propagation delay and low available bandwidth, media access control (MAC) protocol designed for the underwater acoustic sensor network (UWASN) is quite different from that for the terrestrial wireless sensor network. However, for the contention-based MAC protocols, the packet transmission time is long because of the long preamble in real acoustic modems, which increase the packet collisions. And the competition phase lasts for long time when many nodes are competing for the channel to access. For the schedule-based MAC protocols, the delay is too long, especially in a UWASN with low traffic load. In order to resolve these problems, a hybrid reservation-based MAC (HRMAC) protocol is proposed for UWASNs in this paper. In the proposed HRMAC protocol, the nodes reserve the channel by declaring and spectrum spreading technology is used to reduce the collision of the control packets. Many nodes with data packets to be transmitted can reserve the channel simultaneously, and nodes with reserved channel transmit their data in a given order. The performance analysis shows that the proposed HRMAC protocol can improve the channel efficiency greatly. Simulation results also show that the proposed HRMAC protocol achieves better performance, namely higher network throughput, lower packet drop ratio, smaller end-to-end delay, less overhead of control packets and lower energy overhead, compared to existing typical MAC protocols for the UWASNs.     

EOMR: An Energy-Efficient Optimal Multi-path Routing Protocol to Improve QoS in Wireless Sensor Network for IoT Applications

The wireless sensor network based IoT applications mainly suffers from end to end delay, loss of packets during transmission, reduced lifetime of sensor nodes due to loss of energy. To address these challenges, we need to design an efficient routing protocol that not only improves the network performance but also enhances the Quality of Service. In this paper, we design an energy-efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor network based IoT application having unfairness in the network with high traffic load. The proposed protocol considers three-factor to select the optimal path, i.e., lifetime, reliability, and the traffic intensity at the next-hop node. Rigorous simulation has been performed using NS-2. Also, the performance of the proposed protocol is compared with other contemporary protocols. The results show that the proposed protocol performs better concerning energy saving, packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and network lifetime compared to other protocols.

     

无线传感器网络中一种动态节能的MAC协议

媒体访问控制(MAC)协议是无线传感器网络的关键协议之一,它对无线传感网络的运行和性能具有重要的影响.针对基于簇的TDMA机制存在问题,文中提出了一个动态节能的DE-MAC协议,该协议能够根据簇成员节点数目和通信负载动态地分配成员节点的时隙,减少节点的空闲侦听时间.仿真结果表明,DE-MAC协议能够有效地提高信道的利用率和网络能量有效性.     

Evaluation of WiseMAC and extensions on wireless sensor nodes

In the past five years, many energy-efficient medium access protocols for all kinds of wireless networks (WSNs) have been proposed. Some recently developed protocols focus on sensor networks with low traffic requirements are based on so-called preamble sampling or low-power listening. The WiseMAC protocol is one of the first of this kind and still is one of the most energy-efficient MAC protocols for WSNs with low or varying traffic requirements. However, the high energy-efficiency of WiseMAC has shown to come at the cost of a very limited maximum throughput. In this paper, we evaluate the properties and characteristics of a WiseMAC implementation in simulation and on real sensor hardware. We investigate on the energy-consumption of the prototype using state-of-the-art evaluation methodologies. We further propose and examine an enhancement of the protocol designed to improve the traffic-adaptivity of WiseMAC. By conducting both simulation and real-world experiments, we show that the WiseMAC extension achieves a higher maximum throughput at a slightly increased energy cost both in simulation and real-world experiments.     

Medium Access Control for Integrated Multimedia Wireless Access with the Use of a Video Packet Discard Scheme

A well designed Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for wireless networks should provide an efficient mechanism to share the limited bandwidth resources, and satisfy the diverse and usually contradictory Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of each traffic class. In this paper a new MAC protocol for next generation wireless communications is presented and investigated. The protocol uses a combined Packet Discard/Forward Error Correction scheme in order to efficiently integrate MPEG-4 videoconference packet traffic with voice, SMS data and web packet traffic over a noisy wireless channel of high capacity. Our scheme achieves high aggregate channel throughput in all cases of traffic load, while preserving the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of each traffic type, and is shown to clearly outperform DPRMA, another efficient MAC protocol proposed in the literature for multimedia traffic integration over wireless networks. Dr. Polychronis Koutsakis was born in Hania, Greece, in 1974. He received his 5-year Diploma in Electrical Engineering in 1997 from the University of Patras, Greece and his MSc and Ph.D. degrees in Electronic and Computer Engineering in 1999 and 2002, respectively, from the Technical University of Crete, Greece. He was a Visiting Lecturer at the Electronic and Computer Engineering Department of the same University for three years (2003–2006). He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of McMaster University, Canada. His research interests focus on the design, modeling and performance evaluation of computer communication networks, and especially on the design and evaluation of multiple access schemes for multimedia integration over wireless networks, on call admission control and traffic policing schemes for both wireless and wired networks, on multiple access control protocols for mobile satellite networks, wireless sensor networks and powerline networks, and on traffic modeling. Dr. Koutsakis has authored more than 45 peer-reviewed papers in the above mentioned areas, has served as a Guest Editor for an issue of the ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review, as a TPC member for conferences such as IEEE GLOBECOM, IEEE LCN and IEEE PerCom, will serve as Session Chair for the IEEE GLOBECOM 2006 Symposium on Satellite & Space Communications and serves as a reviewer for most of the major journal publications focused on his research field. Moisis Vafiadis was born in Elefsina, Greece, in 1980. He has recently completed his studies towards the Diploma in Electronic Engineering at the Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece. His research interests focus on wireless personal communication networks, and especially on the MAC layer and on the development and testing of wireless multimedia applications.     

ETPS-MAC: Energy Traffic Priority Scheduling-based QoS-aware MAC protocol for hierarchical WSNs

The evolution of the wireless sensor network (WSN) in recent years has reached its greatest heights and applications are increasing day by day, one such application is Smart Monitoring Systems (SMSs) which is in vision of implementation in every urban and rural areas. The implementation of WSN architecture in SMS needs an intelligent scheduling mechanism that efficiently handles the dynamic traffic load without sacrificing the energy efficiency of network. This paper presents a centralized TDMA scheduling based medium access control (MAC) protocol, called Energy Traffic Priority Scheduling MAC (ETPS-MAC) that accommodates variable traffic load while maintaining Quality-of-Service (QoS) assurance in hierarchical WSNs. The ETPS-MAC protocol employs priority scheduling algorithm which considers two factors for assigning priority, the energy factor and the traffic load factor to avoid packet buffering and maintains minimum data packet delay in case of high traffic load. Moreover, a novel rank-based clustering mechanism in FPS-QMAC protocol prolongs the network lifetime by minimizing the distance between the cluster head (CH) and the base station (BS). Both analytical and simulation models demonstrate the superiority of the ETPS-MAC protocol in terms of energy consumption, transmission delay, data throughput and message complexity when compared with the existing TDMA based MAC protocols.     

Contention-free distributed dynamic reservation MAC protocol withdeterministic scheduling (C-FD3R MAC) for wireless ATMnetworks

This paper proposes a novel MAC protocol for wireless ATM networks, which is characterized by a contention-free mechanism of the reservation request and a deterministic nature of mobile-assisted (distributed) uplink scheduling under a framework of the dynamic reservation TDMA, as discussed in the current standardization activities of ETSI Project BRAN (broadband radio access network) and the wireless ATM working group in the ATM Forum. The design objective of the proposed MAC protocol is to guarantee the real-time constraint of the real-time VBR (rt-VBR) traffic class while maximizing the multiplexing gain among all ATM traffic classes, especially with a fixed length frame. The proposed deterministic scheduling scheme for the rt-VBR traffic class lends itself to implementing the minimal configuration of control data units for reservation request as desired under the limited wireless resources. Simulation experiments using statistically multiplexed MPEG-2 video streams are performed for a 25 Mbits/s wireless ATM access link scenario. It has been shown that the proposed framework guarantees the delay constraint of rt-VBR sessions along with its cell loss rate significantly reduced, while improving the average delay performance of the nrt-VBR in the range of 10%-30% without compromising the channel utilization as compared to the DSA++ system     

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.     

A Lightweight Collaborative Fault Tolerant Target Localization System for Wireless Sensor Networks

Efficient target localization in wireless sensor networks is a complex and challenging task. Many past assumptions for target localization are not valid for wireless sensor networks. Limited hardware resources, energy conservation, and noise disruption due to wireless channel contention and instrumentation noise pose new constraints on designers nowadays. In this work, a lightweight acoustic target localization system for wireless sensor networks based on time difference of arrival (TDOA) is presented. When an event is detected, each sensor belonging to a group calculates an estimate of the target's location. A fuzzyART data fusion center detects errors and fuses estimates according to a decision tree based on spatial correlation and consensus vote. Moreover, a MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks (EB-MAC) is developed which is tailored for event-based systems that characterizes acoustic target localization systems. The system was implemented on MicaZ motes with TinyOS and a PIC 18F8720 microcontroller board as a coprocessor. Errors were detected and eliminated hence acquiring a fault tolerant operation. Furthermore, EB-MAC provided a reliable communication platform where high channel contention was lowered while maintaining high throughput.