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.     

低占空比、低碰撞的异步无线传感器网络MAC协议

提高信道监听质量是降低能量消耗和提高通信效率的有效方法。提出了一种低占空比、低碰撞的PB-MAC(predict-base MAC)协议。通过发送节点精确预测接收节点的唤醒时间,降低占空比;采用基于预测的重建连接机制和数据重传机制,有效地避免碰撞和实现高效重传。OMNet++仿真实验结果表明：在50节点随机网络中,PB-MAC的平均占空比、发送消息耗能和平均碰撞次数分别比RI-MAC少68.60%、24.75%、68.05%,比X-MAC少64.39%、64.05%、70.54%。同时,在网格网络中PB-MAC的性能也优于RI-MAC和X-MAC。     

A load-aware energy-efficient and throughput-maximized asynchronous duty cycle MAC for wireless sensor networks

Being a pivotal resource, conservation of energy has been considered as the most striking issue in the wireless sensor network research. Several works have been performed in the last years to devise duty cycle based MAC protocols which optimize energy conservation emphasizing low traffic load scenario. In contrast, considering the high traffic situation, another research trend has been continuing to optimize both energy efficiency and channel utilization employing rate and congestion control at the MAC layer. In this paper, we propose A Load-aware Energy-efficient and Throughput-maximized Asynchronous Duty Cycle MAC (LET-MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks to provide an integrated solution at the MAC layer considering both the low-and high-traffic scenario. Through extensive simulation using ns-2, we have evaluated the performance of LET-MAC. LET-MAC achieves significant energy conservation during low traffic load (i.e., no event), compared to the prior asynchronous protocol, RI-MAC, as well as attains optimal throughput through maximizing the channel utilization and maintains lower delay in regard to the CSMA/CA-like protocol during a high volume of traffic (i.e., when an event occurs).     

MC-LMAC: A multi-channel MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

In traditional wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, energy efficiency may be considered to be the most important concern whereas utilizing bandwidth and maximizing throughput are of secondary importance. However, recent applications, such as structural health monitoring, require high amounts of data to be collected at a faster rate. We present a multi-channel MAC protocol, MC-LMAC, designed with the objective of maximizing the throughput of WSNs by coordinating transmissions over multiple frequency channels. MC-LMAC takes advantage of interference and contention-free parallel transmissions on different channels. It is based on scheduled access which eases the coordination of nodes, dynamically switching their interfaces between channels and makes the protocol operate effectively with no collisions during peak traffic. Time is slotted and each node is assigned the control over a time slot to transmit on a particular channel. We analyze the performance of MC-LMAC with extensive simulations in Glomosim. MC-LMAC exhibits significant bandwidth utilization and high throughput while ensuring an energy-efficient operation. Moreover, MC-LMAC outperforms the contention-based multi-channel MMSN protocol, a cluster-based channel assignment method, and the single-channel CSMA in terms of data delivery ratio and throughput for high data rate, moderate-size networks of 100 nodes at different densities.     

一种基于预约的无线传感器网络MAC协议

无线传感器网络要求的能量高效,低延时,使得MAC协议的设计充满挑战。近来已经提出了很多基于簇的MAC协议,为减少冲突在簇内部采用TDMA方式来协调簇内各个节点的传输。提出了一种在采用簇结构的基础上,使用预约方式来发送数据的R-MAC（Reservation-MAC）协议。当争用节点少的时候,采用随机争用方式来预约数据的发送;在争用节点多的时候,采用时隙争用方式来预约数据的发送。分析表明,R-MAC能够有效地降低能耗和减少延迟。     

无线多媒体传感器网络MAC协议研究综述

无线多媒体传感器网络作为一种多媒体信息获取和处理方式,已在军事、民用及商业领域中显示出广阔的应用前景.无线多媒体传感器网络涉及多方面的技术,MAC协议是其中之一.综述了多媒体传感器网络MAC协议的特点与技术上面临的挑战,从信道接入、调度、差错控制以及数据包大小4个方面着重分析了目前国内外有代表性的协议及算法,探讨了相关研究问题并展望了进一步的研究方向,分析比较了无线多媒体传感器网络MAC协议的仿真平台与工具.     

Efficient reporting node selection-based MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks rely on the cooperative effort of the densely deployed sensor nodes to report the detected events. As a result, sensor observations are highly correlated in the space domain. Typically, multiple sensor nodes may report the same event. Consequently, redundant information may be transmitted by the different sensor nodes, leading thus to unnecessary energy wastage. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the spatial correlation and the number of reporting nodes by developing a new analytical model based on the theoretical framework of the CC-MAC (correlation-based collaborative medium access control) protocol (Vuran and Akyildiz in IEEE/ACM Trans Netw 14(2): 316–32912006). We show that the reporting task can be delegated to a small subset of sensor nodes without transgressing the distortion constraint. Building on this result, a simple spatial correlation medium access control protocol is then proposed to achieve further energy conservation and faster reporting latency than CC-MAC.     

RM-MAC: a reservation based multi-channel MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Convergecast is a general communication pattern of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in which sensed data is collected from outlying sensor nodes and is transmitted to a sink node. In this paper, we consider periodic convergecast, in which data packets are generated and transmitted repeatedly with a certain interval. To support the periodical packet delivery efficiently, we propose a reservation based multi-channel MAC protocol (RM-MAC) which employs a time reservation mechanism. Periodical packet delivery allows receiver nodes to recognize when the next packet is transmitted, which makes the nodes reserve the time for the next packet transmission. Consequently, our proposed mechanism can guarantee minimum delivery latency from source nodes to a sink node. Furthermore, RM-MAC provides a collision resolution mechanism which coordinates the reserved periodical transmissions among multiple sender nodes. It can prevent repeated collisions caused by the multiple-senders-single-receiver problem. We implement RM-MAC by using an ns-2 simulator to compare its performance with other protocols. The simulation results show that RM-MAC outperforms existing protocols in terms of energy efficiency and packet delivery latency.     

IPS-MAC: an informative preamble sampling MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Radio transceivers are the main source of energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where the source of energy supply is non-rechargeable battery. Several MAC protocols have been proposed in order to efficiently conserve energy in the link layer via duty-cycling. Low power listening (LPL) methods have been shown to outperform other schemes in lightly loaded situations which are common in environment monitoring applications. Nonetheless, as the network becomes dense, in LPL protocols such as BMAC a large number of nodes stay awake for each transmission, resulting in high levels of energy consumption. This paper introduces the informative preamble sampling (IPS) protocol in which a transmitter implicitly embeds information about its intended receiver via the power at which the preamble is transmitted. This results in far fewer nodes staying awake for each preamble. Upon hearing the preamble, a receiver executes a decision-making algorithm to decide whether to stay awake. If the decision-making algorithm is too lax, then more nodes stay awake following the preamble. On the other hand if the algorithm is too strict, it is likely that the intended receiver misses the preamble. In this paper we derive the optimal operating points for the IPS protocol. We show analytically that the IPS protocol can achieve a gain in energy by at least a factor of 2 over BMAC. We also conduct extensive simulations to show that IPS can achieve significant energy gains compared to BMAC.     

混合型分簇MAC协议在无线传感器网络中的实现

针对当前MAC协议的研究大多停留在软件仿真阶段的问题,设计一种适用于两层无线传感器网络的混合型MAC协议,并利用节点实现硬件仿真。簇内采用门限服务方式,各节点接到唤醒通知后,依据簇头发布的轮询列表,按照顺序发送数据,实现无冲突通信。簇间采用随机多址接入,各簇头随机争用信道,向汇聚节点发送数据。基于Z-Stack进行协议设计,最后利用CC2530节点搭建无线传感器网络,实现该协议。实验结果表明,使用该协议的系统能够正确运行,吞吐量和平均时延、平均排队队长的实验值与理论值一致。     

传感器网络中异步广播MAC协议的研究

文章在论述节点休眠调度算法中加入了能量感知,这样做主要是控制剩余能量值低的节点的唤醒次数,使其尽可能地处于休眠状态以节省能量。不过这样可能会增加网络的延迟,但是换来的是网络中的节点均匀地消耗能量,从网络的整体来说,可以增加其工作时间。     

基于网络分割的无线传感器网络多信道MAC协议

无线传感器网络中,可用正交信道数目较少和噪声干扰问题制约着多信道MAC协议性能的提升,结合数据采集应用的特点,提出一种基于网络分割的多信道MAC协议。在最小化网络总干扰值的基础上,网络分割引入碰撞因子进一步优化子树结构、降低树内干扰。并利用基于图着色理论的分配策略为每棵子树分配一条高质量信道。仿真实验结果表明,该协议显著提高了网络吞吐量,并且大幅降低了传输延迟和分组丢失率。     

低占空比无线传感器网络邻居发现算法研究

低占空比(low duty cycle,LDC)无线传感器网络邻居发现算法是当前无线传感器网络领域的研究热点之一。当前LDC无线传感器网络的邻居发现算法大致可分为同步邻居发现算法和异步邻居发现算法,其中异步发现算法又可分为基于法定人数的调度算法（Grid quorum和 U-connect）和基于中国剩余定理的调度方法(Disco算法)。针对发现延迟和能量消耗,通过仿真实验对当前LDC无线传感器网络邻居发现领域里的典型算法进行了对比分析,在此基础上得出LDC无线传感器网络邻居发现算法新的研究方向。     

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.     

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.     

An address-light, integrated MAC and routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

We propose an address-light, integrated MAC and routing protocol (abbreviated AIMRP) for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Due to the broad spectrum of WSN applications, there is a need for protocol solutions optimized for specific application classes. AIMRP is proposed for WSNs deployed for detecting rare events which require prompt detection and response. AIMRP organizes the network into concentric tiers around the sink(s), and routes event reports by forwarding them from one tier to another, in the direction of (one of) the sink(s). AIMRP is address-light in that it does not employ unique per-node addressing, and integrated since the MAC control packets are also responsible for finding the next-hop node to relay the data, via an anycast query. For reducing the energy expenditure due to idle-listening, AIMRP provides a power-saving algorithm which requires absolutely no synchronization or information exchange. We evaluate AIMRP through analysis and simulations, and compare it with another MAC protocol proposed for WSNs, S-MAC. AIMRP outperforms S-MAC for event-detection applications, in terms of total average power consumption, while satisfying identical sensor-to-sink latency constraints.     

A synchronous duty-cycled reservation based MAC protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks

To design an energy-efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for the Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) is an urgent research issue since depleted batteries cannot be recharged or replaced in the underwater environment. Moreover, the underwater acoustic channels are affected by hindrances such as long propagation delay and limited bandwidth, which appear in the design of the MAC protocol for the UWSNs. The available MAC protocols for the terrestrial wireless sensor networks exhibit low performance in energy efficiency, throughput and reliability in the UWSNs, and cannot be used in the UWSNs directly because of their unique characteristics. This paper proposes a synchronous duty-cycled reservation-based MAC protocol named Ordered Contention MAC (OCMAC) protocol. The basic mechanism of this protocol is to schedule data transmission by transmitters through the scheduling of Ready To Send (RTS) frames. The protocol eliminates the possible collision during data transmission and improves communication efficiency. The paper analyzes the performance in energy efficiency, throughput and reliability of the protocol by modeling the queuing behavior of OCMAC with a Markov Chain process. Furthermore, the analytical model is validated through a simulation study. The analysis results demonstrated that while providing good throughput and reliability, OCMAC can achieve energy saving.     

A clustered trail-based data dissemination protocol for improving the lifetime of duty cycle enabled wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) usually consist of unmanned and self-organized sensor devices deployed on a target region for monitoring and target tracking purposes. Therefore, extending the lifetime of WSNs is critical to their proper operation. Static sink schemes have been studied extensively and several solutions were proposed to extend the lifetime of WSNs. Such static solutions are known for their bottleneck in the vicinity of a sink, where sensor nodes are more likely to be used as data forwarding points to a nearby sink. These nodes carry most of the data traffic and consequently deplete their energy resources faster than nodes deployed far off static sinks, which end up creating blind spots or even network partitions. A partitioned, i.e., disconnected network will cease to function properly in view of sink stations becoming unreachable. The consensus reached by the research community to solve this bottleneck, or at least to alleviate traffic and energy consumption near data sinks, is the use of mobile sinks. To this end, this paper presents a new data dissemination strategy (eTrail) that combines clustering, trail generation, and sleep scheduling techniques to extend network lifetime even further. Network lifetime is modeled and analyzed by means of a continuous time Markov chain. In addition, an extensive set of simulation experiments is presented and discussed. Results show that eTrail outperforms existing schemes in terms of network lifetime, while maintaining acceptable packet delivery reliability and latency.     

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.     

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.