Clustering Based Two Dimensional Motion of Sink Node in Wireless Sensor Networks

The wireless sensor network (WSN) is always known for its limited-energy issues and finding a good solution for energy minimization in WSNs is still a concern for researchers. Implementing mobility to the sink node is used widely for energy conservation or minimization in WSNs which reduces the distance between sink and communicating nodes. In this paper, with the intention to conserve energy from the sensor nodes, we designed a clustering based routing protocol implementing a mobile sink called ‘two dimensional motion of sink node (TDMS)’. In TDMS, each normal sensor node collects data and send it to their respective leader node called cluster head (CH). The sink moves in the two dimensional direction to collect final data from all CH nodes, particularly it moves in the direction to that CH which has the minimum remaining energy. The proposed protocol is validated through rigorous simulation using MATLAB and comparisons have been made with WSN’s existing static sink and mobile sink routing protocols over two different geographical square dimensions of the network. Here, we found that TDMS model gives the optimal result on energy dissipation per round and increased network lifetime.

     

A schedule‐based medium access control protocol for mobile wireless sensor networks

Recent advances in body area network technologies such as radio frequency identification and ham radio, to name a few, have introduced a huge gap between the use of current wireless sensor network technologies and specific needs of some important wireless sensor network applications such as medical care, disaster relief, or emergency preparedness and response. In these types of applications, the mobility of nodes can occur, leading to the challenge of mobility handling. In this paper, we address this challenge by prioritizing transmissions of mobile nodes over static nodes. This is achieved by using shorter contention windows in reservation slots for mobile nodes (the so‐called backoff technique) combined with a novel hybrid medium access control (MAC) protocol (the so‐called versatile MAC). The proposed protocol advocates channel reuse for bandwidth efficiency and management purpose. Through extensive simulations, our protocol is compared with other MAC alternatives such as time division multiple access and IEEE 802.11 with request to send/clear to send exchange, chosen as benchmarks. The performance metrics used are bandwidth utilization, fairness of medium access, and energy consumption. The superiority of versatile MAC against the studied benchmark protocols is established with respect to these metrics. Copyright © 2012 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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Cross-layer design and analysis of WSN-based mobile target detection systems

The limited node capabilities typical of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) call for cross-layer design optimization. In this paper, we address the problem of designing and operating long-lasting surveillance mobile target detection applications for unattended WSNs with a priori knowledge of the nodes’ positions. In particular, we focus on the cross-layer interaction between the sensing layer (devoted to the detection of a mobile target crossing the monitored area) and the communication layer (devoted to the transmission of the alert, upon detection, from a sensing node to the network sink). The performance of the sensing layer is characterized by the probability of target missed detection and the delay before the first sensor detection act. The communication layer is investigated considering two Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols: X-MAC [1] and the novel Cascade (Cas)-MAC protocol, inspired by the principles of the D-MAC protocol [2]. At both layers, we validate analytical models through realistic simulations and experiments. The cross-layer interaction between the two layers is achieved considering a proper model for the network lifetime, based on the average energy depletion at the node level. Finally, to highlight the benefits of the proposed framework, we present a cross-layer optimization approach for the configuration of the system parameters, considering several relevant network topologies.     

Collision Free Mobility Adaptive (CFMA) MAC for wireless sensor networks

In this paper we propose high throughput collision free, mobility adaptive and energy efficient medium access protocol (MAC) called Collision Free Mobility Adaptive (CFMA) for wireless sensor networks. CFMA ensures that transmissions incur no collisions, and allows nodes to undergo sleep mode whenever they are not transmitting or receiving. It uses delay allocation scheme based on traffic priority at each node and avoids allocating same backoff delay for more than one node unless they are in separate clusters. It also allows nodes to determine when they can switch to sleep mode during operation. CFMA for mobile nodes provides fast association between the mobile node and the cluster coordinator. The proposed MAC performs well in both static and mobile scenarios, which shows its significance over existing MAC protocols proposed for mobile applications. The performance of CFMA is evaluated through extensive simulation, analysis and comparison with other mobility aware MAC protocols. The results show that CFMA outperforms significantly the existing CSMA/CA, Sensor Mac (S-MAC), Mobile MAC (MOB-MAC), Adaptive Mobility MAC (AM-MAC), Mobility Sensor MAC (MS-MAC), Mobility aware Delay sensitive MAC (MD-MAC) and Dynamic Sensor MAC (DS-MAC) protocols including throughput, latency and energy consumption.     

Mobility-aware timeout medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), has been under development for a while by the academia and industry. Due to limited computational power, a typical sensor node may experience operational challenges. Moreover, mobility has become an important feature since emergency and healthcare related applications are evolving in WSNs. Consideration of mobile nodes in WSNs introduce new challenges for the designers. In this paper, an enhanced version of T-MAC protocol (a well-known medium access control protocol in WSNs) known as MT-MAC is proposed. Using the capturing fluctuation in RSSI and LQI values of the received SYNC packets, MT-MAC solves high packet drop ratio in T-MAC. By detecting the mobility, a mobile node softly handover to a new virtual cluster without losing connection with other nodes. The performance of the proposed solution is then compared with T-MAC, S-MAC as well as other well-known mobility-aware MAC (MS-MAC) protocol. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol significantly increases the throughput and packet delivery ratio of T-MAC in exchange for a small increase in power consumption. Compared to MS-MAC protocol, the proposed approach can reduce power consumption by 20–65%, and achieve slightly higher packet delivery ratio.     

Improving the medium access in highly mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobility has recently been contemplated as a way to improve sensing coverage and connectivity in unattended Wireless Sensor Networks. However, accessing the medium in such dynamic topologies raises multiple problems on mobile sensors. Synchronization issues between fixed and mobile nodes may prevent the latter from successfully sending data to their peers. Mobile nodes can also suffer from long medium access delays when traveling through congested areas. In these circumstances, the expected next hop may not be valid anymore when the data packet is actually sent on the medium. In this article, we present the X-Machiavel protocol which aims at addressing these issues. By allowing mobile nodes to take possession of a reserved medium, it guarantees that they will be able to send their data in congested networks within a small delay, while keeping the overhead low for the fixed sensors. Our proposal also relieves the mobile sensors from maintaining a list of next hops by relying on the fixed sensors infrastructure for the routing operations. We demonstrate by simulation the benefits of our proposal compared to the X-MAC protocol on which our contribution relies. The principles behind X-Machiavel can be combined with other preamble sampling protocols in order to improve their efficiency in mobile environments.     

Multi-channel support for DMAC in WSNs

Currently most wireless sensor network applications assume the presence of single-channel medium access control (MAC) protocols. However, lower sensing range result in dense networks, single-channel MAC protocols may be inadequate due to higher demand for the limited bandwidth. In this paper we proposed a method of multi-channel support for DMAC in Wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The channel assignment method is based on local information of nodes. Our multi-channel DMAC protocol implement channel distribution before message collecting from source nodes to sink node and made broadcasting possible in DMAC. Analysis and simulation result displays this multi-channel protocol obviously decreases the latency without increasing energy consumption.     

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.     

Relocation routing for energy balancing in mobile sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely investigated in the past decades because of its applicability in various extreme environments. As sensors use battery, most works on WSNs focus on energy efficiency issues (e.g., local energy balancing problems) in statically deployed WSNs. Few works have paid attention to the global energy balancing problem for the scenario that mobile sensor nodes can move freely. In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol called global energy balancing routing protocol (GEBRP) based on an active network framework and node relocation in mobile sensor networks. This protocol achieves global energy efficiency by repairing coverage holes and replacing invalid nodes dynamically. Simulation and experiment results demonstrate that the proposed GEBRP achieves superior performance over the existing scheme. In addition, we analyze the delay performance of GEBRP and study how the delay performance is affected by various system parameters.Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Energy-Aware Data Aggregation for Grid-Based Wireless Sensor Networks with a Mobile Sink

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are made up of many small and highly sensitive nodes that have the ability to react quickly. In WSNs, sink mobility brings new challenges to large-scale sensor networks. Almost all of the energy-aware routing protocols that have been proposed for WSNs aim at optimizing network performance while relaying data to a stationary gateway (sink). However, through such contemporary protocols, mobility of the sink can make established routes unstable and non-optimal. The use of mobile sinks introduces a trade-off between the need for frequent rerouting to ensure optimal network operation and the desire to minimize the overhead of topology management. In this paper, in order to reduce energy consumption and minimize the overhead of rerouting frequency, we propose an energy-aware data aggregation scheme (EADA) for grid-based wireless sensor networks with a mobile sink. In the proposed scheme, each sensor node with location information and limited energy is considered. Our approach utilizes location information and selects a special gateway in each area of a grid responsible for forwarding messages. We restrict the flooding region to decrease the overhead for route decision by utilizing local information. We conducted simulations to show that the proposed routing scheme outperforms the coordination-based data dissemination scheme (CODE) (Xuan, H. L., & Lee, S. Proceedings of the Sensor Networks and Information Processing Conference, pp. 13–18, 2004).     

QoS evaluation of energy-efficient ML-MAC protocol 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. If 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.     

Mobility Impact on Cluster Based MAC Layer Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enable a wide variety of applications resulting in still increasing requirements for the protocols supporting the operations. The medium access control (MAC) layer protocols are essential for improving the performance of an application and its quality of service because MAC protocols influence channel capacity utilization, network delay, energy consumption, and scalability. The contribution of this paper is two novel cluster-based time division multiple access (TDMA) scheduling MACs for WSNs and an analysis of the mobility impact on both. The proposed MAC layer protocols support real time applications where the cluster-based scheduling improves the scalability and also improves the performance in varying network conditions. The paper presents the design, implementation and performance evaluation of the proposed cluster based TDMA scheduling algorithms green conflict free (GCF) and multicolor-GCF (M-GCF) for high complexity and high requirement applications of WSNs under both low and high mobility conditions. The comparative evaluation shows that the M-GCF algorithm has better slot sharing and less conflicts with reduced communication energy consumption, delay, and good throughput under static and low mobility conditions while the GCF algorithm has better performance in high mobility scenarios. The paper also defines the mobility threshold that decides the use of the GCF- and M-GCF algorithms according to the mobility requirement of application.     

A Green Clustering Protocol for Mobile Sensor Network Using Particle Swarm Optimization

Energy consumption of sensor nodes is one of the crucial issues in prolonging the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. One of the methods that can improve the utilization of sensor nodes batteries is the clustering method. In this paper, we propose a green clustering protocol for mobile sensor networks using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. We define a new fitness function that can optimize the energy consumption of the whole network and minimize the relative distance between cluster heads and their respective member nodes. We also take into account the mobility factor when defining the cluster membership, so that the sensor nodes can join the cluster that has the similar mobility pattern. The performance of the proposed protocol is compared with well-known clustering protocols developed for wireless sensor networks such as LEACH (low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy) and protocols designed for sensor networks with mobile nodes called CM-IR (clustering mobility-invalid round). In addition, we also modify the improved version of LEACH called MLEACH-C, so that it is applicable to the mobile sensor nodes environment. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol using PSO algorithm can improve the energy consumption of the network, achieve better network lifetime, and increase the data delivered at the base station.     

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.     

Key establishment and management for WSNs

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are composed of a large number of low-cost, low-power, and multi-functional sensor nodes that communicate at short distances through wireless links. Those networks could be deployed in an open and hostile environment where attackers may be present. In this context, it is necessary to guarantee confidentiality, integrity and security services in the network. Those security properties could only be achieved if security associations have been created in the network between pairs of nodes, each node and the base station of groups of nodes. Those associations are created through key management protocols for pairwise or group establishment, distribution, renewing of cryptographic keys. Those protocols must only use information that is available in the network or pre-loaded in each sensor as the WSNs mus be autonomous. Moreover, due to the low-cost nature of each node, an attacker is able to compromise nodes because the nodes are not tamper-resistant. Thus a major challenge of the key management protocols becomes to preserve the general security of the network even if t nodes are compromised. We propose in this article a key management and access control protocol based upon a group deployment model. Moreover, this protocol is t-secure, i.e. t corrupted nodes are not sufficient to corrupt all the keys used in the network.     

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.