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.     

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.     

High-performance architectures for IP-based multihop 802.11 networks

The concept of a forwarding node, which receives packets from upstream nodes and then transmits these packets to downstream nodes, is a key element of any multihop network, wired or wireless. While high-speed IP router architectures have been extensively studied for wired networks, the concept of a "wireless IP router" has not been addressed so far. We examine the limitations of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in supporting a low-latency and high-throughput IP datapath comprising multiple wireless LAN hops. We first propose a wireless IP forwarding architecture that uses MPLS with modifications to 802.11 MAC to significantly improve packet forwarding efficiency. We then study further enhancements to 802.11 MAC that improve system throughput by allowing a larger number of concurrent packet transmissions in multihop 802.11-based IP networks. With 802.11 poised to be the dominant technology for wireless LANs, we believe a combined approach to MAC, packet forwarding, and transport layer protocols is needed to make high-performance multihop 802.11 networks practically viable.     

Energy‐efficient void avoidance geographic routing protocol for underwater sensor networks

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) consist of a group of sensors that send the information to the sonobuoys at the surface level. Void area, however, is one of the challenges faced by UWSNs. When a sensor falls in a void area of communication, it causes problems such as high latency, power consumption, or packet loss. In this paper, an energy‐efficient void avoidance geographic routing protocol (EVAGR) has been proposed to handle the void area with low amount of energy consumption. In this protocol, a suitable set of forwarding nodes is selected using a weight function, and the data packets are forwarded to the nodes inside the set. The weight function includes the consumed energy and the depth of the candidate neighboring nodes, and candidate neighboring node selection is based on the packet advancement of the neighboring nodes toward the sonobuoys. Extensive simulation experiments were performed to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed protocol. Simulation results revealed that the proposed protocol can effectively achieve better performance in terms of energy consumption, packet drop, and routing overhead compared with the similar routing protocol.     

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.     

A Vector-Based Routing Protocol in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

One major concern shared by many researchers about underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs), with respect to the limitations and particularities of underwater environment, is the problem of routing. These limitations include three-dimensional topology, limited bandwidth, node movement, long delay, limited energy, and construction costs. The new routing protocols for underwater networks have been developed on the basis of voracious routing systems. The main problem with UWSNs is finding an efficient route between the source and the target to send more packets to the target with lower levels of energy consumption. In this research, by improving VBF algorithm, which is dependent on the radius of the routing pipe, an algorithm is introduced which considers pipe radius as a function of the environment’s dimensions and of the range and the number of nodes. Consequently, by changing one of these parameters, the radius of the routing pipe changes. However, to control the energy consumed by the nodes, there exists a function that, if the recipient node’s energy to receive the packet is much lower than that of the sender node, the proposed method reduces the size of the routing pipe’s radius to lessen its chance of being selected as the guiding node so that other nodes are able to have the chance of getting the packet’s guiding node. The proposed algorithm has been compared with VBVA, HHVBF, and VBF protocols; the simulation results obtained from NS-2 simulator indicate that the proposed protocol could cut back on energy consumption, especially in networks with high number of nodes, by relying on changing the width of the routing pipe in proportion to network density. It was also successful in delivering more packets in non-dense networks.     

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.     

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.     

Adaptive data aggregation with probabilistic routing in wireless sensor networks

Periodical extraction of raw sensor readings is one of the most representative and comprehensive applications in Wireless sensor networks. In order to reduce the data redundancy and the communication load, in-network data aggregation is usually applied to merge the packets during the routing process. Aggregation protocols with deterministic routing pre-construct the stationary structure to perform data aggregation. However, the overhead of construction and maintenance always outweighs the benefits of data aggregation under dynamic scenarios. This paper proposes an Adaptive Data Aggregation protocol with Probabilistic Routing for the periodical data collection events. The main idea is to encourage the nodes to use an optimal routing structure for data aggregation with certain probability. The optimal routing structure is defined as a Multi-Objective Steiner Tree, which can be explored and exploited by the routing scheme based on the Ant Colony Optimization and Genetic Algorithm hybrid approach. The probabilistic routing decision ensures the adaptability for some topology transformations. Moreover, by using the prediction model based on the sliding window for future arriving packets, the adaptive timing policy can reduce the transmission delay and can enhance the aggregation probability. Therefore, the packet transmission converges from both spatial and temporal aspects for the data aggregation. Finally, the theoretical analysis and the simulation results validate the feasibility and the high efficiency of the novel protocol when compared with other existing approaches.     

A Delay-Tolerant Virtual Tunnel Scheme for Asynchronous MAC protocols in WSN

Typically, asynchronous MAC protocols are used to monitor a significant facility for rare events or to detect an intrusion in wireless sensor networks. Moreover, asynchronous MAC protocols can achieve high energy efficiency due to the fact that there is no periodic control frame. However, asynchronous MAC protocols have the problem of long end-to-end delay time caused by the absence of precedent time synchronization per link. This paper proposes a new scheme, called virtual tunnel (VT), which can reduce the delivery delay of asynchronous MAC protocols in multi-hop environment. The VT scheme can achieve approximated duty cycle synchronization with on-demand approach. In this scheme, through the estimation of next wakeup time of peer node, without exceptional process, each node on the transmission path can improve end-to-end delay in multi-hop topologies. And it becomes low power consumption by reducing unnecessary retransmissions. Additionally, we devise the protection method of VT. In our simulation results, end-to-end delay according to hop counts and traffic amount is compared with the X-MAC that is an asynchronous protocol recently developed. Furthermore, it is shown that the VT scheme decreases energy consumption due to the lower end-to-end delay than the X-MAC in multi-hop topologies.     

Double Cluster Based Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network

Reducing the energy consumption of sensor nodes and prolonging the life of the network is the central topic in the research of wireless sensor network (WSN) protocol. The low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) is one of the hierarchical routing protocols designed for communication in WSNs. LEACH is clustering based protocol that utilizes randomized rotation of local cluster-heads to evenly distribute the energy load among the sensors in the network. But LEACH is based on the assumption that each sensor nodes contain equal amount of energy which is not valid in real scenarios. A developed routing protocol named as DL-LEACH is proposed. The DL-LEACH protocol cluster head election considers residual energy of nodes, distance from node to the base station and neighbor nodes, which makes cluster head election reasonable and node energy consumption balance. The simulation results of proposed protocols are compared for its network life time in MATLAB with LEACH protocol. The DL-LEACH is prolong the network life cycle by 75 % than LEACH.     

Opportunistic media access control and routing for delay-tolerant mobile ad hoc networks

In delay-tolerant mobile ad hoc networks, motion of network nodes, network sparsity and sporadic density can cause a lack of guaranteed connectivity. These networks experience significant link delay and their routing protocols must take a store-and-forward approach. In this paper, an opportunistic routing protocol is proposed, along with its compatible media access control, for non-real-time services in delay-tolerant networks. The scheme is mobility-aware such that each network node needs to know its own position and velocity. The media access control employs a four-fold handshake procedure to probe the wireless channel and cooperatively prioritize candidate nodes for packet replication. It exploits the broadcast characteristic of the wireless medium to utilize long-range but unreliable links. The routing process seizes opportunities of node contacts for data delivery. It takes a multiple-copy approach that is adaptive with node movements. Numerical results in mobile ad hoc networks and vehicular ad hoc networks show superior performance of the proposed protocol compared with other routing protocols. The mobility-aware media access control and routing scheme exhibits relatively small packet delivery delay and requires a modest amount of total packet replications/transmissions.     

A method to enhance lifetime in data aggregation for multi-hop wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks nowadays find wide variety of applications especially in real time. Innovative methods of energy efficient protocols and transmission reduction techniques keep improving to enhance the lifetime of the sensor nodes as they are powered by non-rechargeable batteries. Multi hop transmission and data aggregation are major techniques to reduce the power spent by the sensor node. In this paper, we propose a new ribbon structure for the existing multi hop WSN topologies with modified media access control mechanism called co-operative MAC. The ribbon structure is proposed to reap benefits of PEGASIS and APTEEN protocols. The low power consumption as in PEGASIS is maintained but the number of data packets transmitted is reduced by half. In the proposed scheme, only one of the two nodes along the parallel path involves in data transmission alternating roles in every cycle of aggregation. However, for values sensed above threshold, the inactive node interferes with normal cycle and gets its data transmitted to the sink node. This algorithm is compared with cluster based and chain based protocols and the simulation results show significant energy savings.     

Energy‐aware geographic routing in wireless sensor networks with anchor nodes

Energy efficiency has become an important design consideration in geographic routing protocols for wireless sensor networks because the sensor nodes are energy constrained and battery recharging is usually not feasible. However, numerous existing energy‐aware geographic routing protocols are energy‐inefficient when the detouring mode is involved in the routing. Furthermore, most of them rarely or at most implicitly take into account the energy efficiency in the advance. In this paper, we present a novel energy‐aware geographic routing (EAGR) protocol that attempts to minimize the energy consumption for end‐to‐end data delivery. EAGR adaptively uses an existing geographic routing protocol to find an anchor list based on the projection distance of nodes for guiding packet forwarding. Each node holding the message utilizes geographic information, the characteristics of energy consumption, and the metric of advanced energy cost to make forwarding decisions, and dynamically adjusts its transmission power to just reach the selected node. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme exhibits higher energy efficiency, smaller end‐to‐end delay, and better packet delivery ratio compared to other geographic routing protocols. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

无线Ad hoc网络中基于节点位置的功率控制算法

为了降低无线Ad hoc网络中节点的能量消耗,该文提出了一种基于节点位置的功率控制算法(PCAP)。PCAP算法通过分析节点间的位置关系,建立节点的优化邻居集合,并对路由层报文、MAC层控制报文和其它数据类报文使用不同的功率控制策略。PCAP算法在保证网络连接性的同时能降低网络能量消耗,计算机仿真表明,PCAP算法在MAC层的吞吐量、MAC层丢包、端到端时延等方面取得较好的性能表现。     

DABPR: a large-scale internet of things-based data aggregation back pressure routing for disaster management

In this paper, we propose a data aggregation back pressure routing (DABPR) scheme, which aims to simultaneously aggregate overlapping routes for efficient data transmission and prolong the lifetime of the network. The DABPR routing algorithm is structured into five phases in which event data is sent from the event areas to the sink nodes. These include cluster-head selection, maximization of event detection reliability, data aggregation, scheduling, and route selection with multi attributes decision making metrics phases. The scheme performs data aggregation on redundant data at relay nodes in order to decrease both the size and rate of message exchanges to minimize communication overhead and energy consumption. The proposed scheme is assessed in terms of packet delivery, network lifetime, ratio, energy consumption, and throughput, and compared with two other well-known protocols, namely “information-fusion-based role assignment (InFRA)” and “data routing for in-network aggregation (DRINA)”, which intrinsically are cluster and tree-based routing schemes designed to improve data aggregation efficiency by maximizing the overlapping routes. Meticulous analysis of the simulated data showed that DABPR achieved overall superior proficiency and more reliable performance in all the evaluated performance metrics, above the others. The proposed DABPR routing scheme outperformed its counterparts in the average energy consumption metric by 64.78% and 51.41%, packet delivery ratio by 28.76% and 16.89% and network lifetime by 42.72% and 20.76% compared with InFRA and DRINA, respectively.

     

异质节点分离CRSN中MAC协议设计与性能分析

认知无线传感器网络(CRSN)是一种将认知无线电(CR)技术引入传统WSN中的新型网络,具有一定的应用价值和发展前景.然而,CRSN中的认知功能带来的额外能耗和处理要求及其高成本实现,阻碍了它的进一步发展及应用.基于此,提出将认知功能迁移到另外一类节点——认知节点,并使其拥有较强的处理能力和能量收集能力.认知节点与普通传感器节点按照一定比例进行部署,组成另外一种新型网络——异质节点CRSN (HT-CRSN),这种新型网络能够提高网络性能并降低部署成本.并提出了一种能够适用于这种异质节点传感器网络的工作时序及其一系列可行性的MAC协议(FBP等).通过对所提MAC协议的能耗分析,说明可以通过调整两类异质节点的部署比例和能量收集速率均衡两类异质节点的能耗,进而提高网络生命周期.     

Congestion Aware Geographic Routing Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

Geographic routing protocols forward packets according to the geographical locations of nodes. Thus, the criteria used to select a forwarding node impacts on the performance of the protocols such as energy efficiency and end-to-end transmission delay. In this paper, we propose a congestion aware forwarder selection (CAFS) method for a geographic routing protocol. To design CAFS, we devise a cost function by combining not only the forward progress made to a packet but also the amount of energy required for packet forwarding, forwarding direction, and congestion levels of potential forwarders. Among the potential forwarders, CAFS selects the next forwarder having the minimum cost. In our simulation studies, we compare the performance of CAFS with those of the maximum progress (MP) method and the cost over progress (CoP) method in various network conditions. The results show that compared with MP, the length of a routing path in terms of the number of hops becomes longer when CAFS is used. However, the shorter hop distance helps to avoid unnecessary retransmissions caused by packet loss in a wireless channel. In addition, since CAFS considers congestion levels of candidate forwarders, it reduces the queuing delay in each forwarder. Therefore, CAFS is superior to the MP and the CoP in terms of the energy consumption, end-to-end packet transfer delay, and the successful packet delivery rate.     

Performance evaluation of packet aggregation scheme for VoIP service in wireless multi-hop network

In a wireless multi-hop network environment, energy consumption of mobile nodes is an important factor for the performance evaluation of network life-time. In Voice over IP (VoIP) service, the redundant data size of a VoIP packet such as TCP/IP headers is much larger than the voice data size of a VoIP packet. Such an inefficient structure of VoIP packet causes heavy energy waste in mobile nodes. In order to alleviate the effect of VoIP packet transmission on energy consumption, a packet aggregation algorithm that transmits one large VoIP packet by combining multiple small VoIP packets has been studied. However, when excessively many VoIP packets are combined, it may cause deterioration of the QoS of VoIP service, especially for end-to-end delay. In this paper, we analyze the effect of the packet aggregation algorithm on both VoIP service quality and the energy consumption of mobile nodes in a wireless multi-hop environment. We build the cost function that describes the degree of trade-off between the QoS of VoIP services and the energy consumption of a mobile node. By using this cost function, we get the optimum number of VoIP packets to be combined in the packet aggregation scheme under various wireless channel conditions. We expect this study to contribute to providing guidance on balancing the QoS of VoIP service and energy consumption of a mobile node when the packet aggregation algorithm is applied to VoIP service in a wireless multi-hop networks.     

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.