Location‐aided medium access control for low data rate UWB wireless sensor networks

This paper presents a distributed medium access control (MAC) protocol for low data rate ultra‐wideband (UWB) wireless sensor networks (WSNs), named LA‐MAC. Current MAC proposal is closely coupled to the IEEE 802.15.4a physical layer and it is based on its Impulse‐Radio (IR) paradigm. LA‐MAC protocol amplifies its admission control mechanism with location‐awareness, by exploiting the ranging capability of the UWB signals. The above property leads to accurate interference predictions and blocking assessments that each node in the network can perform locally, limiting at the same time the actions needed to be performed towards the admission phase. LA‐MAC is evaluated through extensive simulations, showing a significant improvement in many critical parameters, such as throughput, admission ratio, energy consumption, and delay, under different traffic load conditions. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

XMSN: An efficient cross‐layer protocol for mixed wireless sensor networks

The application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) technology in monitoring systems is demanding more efficient services to fulfill the requirements of the monitoring task. For this purpose, the simultaneous presence of features such as different communication mediums (air and water) used by nodes and various sizes of data generated by heterogeneous nodes are the key obstacles to build a communication protocol, which can ensure the reliable data delivery. This work terms such WSNs as mixed wireless sensor networks (MWSNs) which contains the aforementioned features. In this paper, we introduce a new cross‐layer protocol for mixed wireless sensor network (XMSN) which can adapt these features. The proposed cross layer protocol XMSN for such mixed environment is implemented and analyzed extensively in Castalia simulator. The performance of XMSN is compared with composition of well‐known protocols, namely, CTP plus BoX‐MAC‐2. The result shows that XMSN has better efficiency in terms of end‐to‐end delay, energy consumption, and goodput than that of CTP plus BoX‐MAC‐2 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.     

Performance optimization of duty‐cycled MAC in delay‐energy constrained sensor network under uniform and nonuniform traffic generation

Duty‐cycle at the media access control (MAC) layer plays a key role in energy savings and network lifetime extension. It consists in putting a node's radio in the sleep state as soon as it has no communication activity. Traditional wireless sensor network MAC protocols are designed with short duty‐cycles at the cost of long delays. Careful design is required for joint energy‐delay constrained applications, where the optimal parameters should be thoroughly derived. The present paper deals with this issue and mathematically derives optimal values of key MAC parameters under low data rate applications for 3 well‐known duty‐cycled MAC protocols, WiseMAC, SCP‐MAC, and LMAC as representatives of 3 MAC protocol categories, respectively, preamble‐sampling, slotted contention‐based, and frame‐based. The analysis provides also the optimum traffic sampling rate that guarantees the minimum energy consumption. It shows the role of these parameters in achieving the targeted end‐to‐end delay constraints under network models with uniform traffic generation, for ring and grid topologies. As a second contribution, the model is extended to nonuniform traffic scenarios, where a certain percentage of deployed nodes are relays whose role is to balance traffic forwarding and save the overall network energy. The results reveal that different optimal internal MAC parameters and traffic generation rates can be found for different configurations of relay nodes deployment, which achieve minimal network energy consumption while satisfying the application required end‐to‐end delay threshold.     

无线传感器网络能量高效混合MAC算法

针对无线传感器网络MAC协议中存在的能耗问题,提出了能量高效的无线传感器网络混合MAC(EEH-MAC)算法,采用基于TDMA机制的时槽系数动态调整簇内节点的时槽大小来降低数据的传输时延;同时,对部分不需要数据传输的节点不分配时槽来减少能耗;按簇内节点剩余能量系数形成时槽分配顺序来减少状态转换的能耗;在簇头之间采用CSMA/CA机制的随机分配策略进行通信.仿真结果表明,EEH-MAC协议能有效减少能耗并延长网络生命周期.     

IAMMAC: an interference‐aware multichannel MAC protocol for wireless sensor–actor networks

In this paper, we discuss an interference aware multichannel MAC (IAMMAC) protocol assign channels for communication in wireless sensor‐actor networks. An actor acts as a cluster head for k‐hop sensors and computes the shortest path for all the sensors. Then, the actor partitions the cluster into multiple subtrees and assigns a noninterference channel to each subtree. The actor 1‐hop sensors are represented as relay nodes. The actor selects a relay node as a backup cluster head (BCH) based on the residual energy and node degree. After selecting a BCH from the relay nodes, the actor broadcast this information to the remaining relay nodes using the common control channel. The relay sensors use the same channel of BCH to communicate with it. However, the other cluster members do not change their data channel. Further, interference‐aware and throughput‐aware multichannel MAC protocol is also proposed for actor–actor coordination. The performance of the proposed IAMMAC protocol is analyzed using standard network parameters such as packet delivery ratio, goodput, end‐to‐end delay, and energy dissipation in the network. The obtained simulation results indicate that the IAMMAC protocol has superior performance as compared with the existing MAC protocols. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

SPEECH‐MAC: Special purpose energy‐efficient contention‐based hybrid MAC protocol for WSN and Zigbee network

Energy‐efficient Zigbee‐based wireless sensor network (WSN) occupies a major role in emergency‐based applications. The foremost drawback of such applications is maintaining the battery power because frequent changing is not possible in those conditions. In the earlier days, several researches created new model MAC protocols in terms of increase the lifetime of the WSN. But still, there is a research gap particularly in emergency applications. In order to improve the lifetime of such applications, we introduced a novel hybrid MAC protocol, namely, special purpose energy‐efficient contention‐based hybrid MAC (SPEECH‐MAC) protocol. This protocol includes dual hop concept considerably to save the energy. Both the single hop network and the dual hop networks are developed, and the results are analyzed. Prioritization mechanism for SPEECH‐MAC protocol is introduced to analyze the emergency conditions in detail. In summary, according to the simulation, the calculated parameters are total residual energy, end‐to‐end delay, packet drop, packet delivery ratio, and network throughput.     

On MAC optimization for large-scale wireless sensor network

The media access control (MAC) performance of a large-scale wireless sensor network (L-WSN) determines the efficiency of the wireless communication channel. A good MAC protocol could reduce network energy consumption and network delay, which are two problems to be solved urgently in L-WSN. In this paper, we proposed a multi-level integrated MAC protocol (MI-MAC) to solve the overall performance optimization problem of L-WSN. Compared with other protocols, MI-MAC has two mainly improved performances: (1) It improved binary exponential backoff algorithm by twice back off strategy; (2) It designed a sending and receiving algorithm based on the threshold value to recognize control frames (small frames), which effectively avoids the collision probability of data frame. The simulation results show that the MI-MAC protocol improves network throughput and delay performance, significantly reduces energy consumption, and obtains overall network optimization.     

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.     

Delay aware reliable transport in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are event‐based systems that rely on the collective effort of several sensor nodes. Reliable event detection at the sink is based on collective information provided by the sensor nodes and not on any individual sensor data. Hence, conventional end‐to‐end reliability definitions and solutions are inapplicable in the WSN regime and would only lead to a waste of scarce sensor resources. Moreover, the reliability objective of WSN must be achieved within a certain real‐time delay bound posed by the application. Therefore, the WSN paradigm necessitates a collective delay‐constrained event‐to‐sink reliability notion rather than the traditional end‐to‐end reliability approaches. To the best of our knowledge, there is no transport protocol solution which addresses both reliability and real‐time delay bound requirements of WSN simultaneously. In this paper, the delay aware reliable transport (DART) protocol is presented for WSN. The objective of the DART protocol is to timely and reliably transport event features from the sensor field to the sink with minimum energy consumption. In this regard, the DART protocol simultaneously addresses congestion control and timely event transport reliability objectives in WSN. In addition to its efficient congestion detection and control algorithms, it incorporates the time critical event first (TCEF) scheduling mechanism to meet the application‐specific delay bounds at the sink node. Importantly, the algorithms of the DART protocol mainly run on resource rich sink node, with minimal functionality required at resource constrained sensor nodes. Furthermore, the DART protocol can accommodate multiple concurrent event occurrences in a wireless sensor field. Performance evaluation via simulation experiments show that the DART protocol achieves high performance in terms of real‐time communication requirements, reliable event detection and energy consumption in WSN. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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。     

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.     

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.     

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.     

带休眠算法的无线传感器网络MAC协议

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

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.     

水声传感网MAC协议的研究进展

水声传感网因其广阔的应用领域和巨大的应用潜力,近年来已成为通信领域的研究新热点,MAC协议是水声传感网的重要组成部分.概述水声传感网MAC协议的研究现状,指出水声传感网的MAC协议大体可分为基于非竞争的MAC协议和基于竞争的MAC协议,并对不同类别协议的优缺点进行对比分析.针对现有各种协议在吞吐量、开销、信道利用率以及网络的扩展性等方面均存在优势和不足等,从如何更好地克服水声通信中的传播时延长、可用带宽有限、能量消耗大和移动性大等方面,提出更合理更实用的水声通信MAC协议将是该领域未来的重点研究方向.     

Energy‐Efficient Quorum‐Based MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The reliability of sensor networks is generally dependent on the battery power of the sensor nodes that it employs; hence it is crucial for the sensor nodes to efficiently use their battery resources. This research paper presents a method to increase the reliability of sensor nodes by constructing a connected dominating tree (CDT), which is a subnetwork of wireless sensor networks. It detects the minimum number of dominatees, dominators, forwarder sensor nodes, and aggregates, as well as transmitting data to the sink. A new medium access control (MAC) protocol, called Homogenous Quorum‐Based Medium Access Control (HQMAC), is also introduced, which is an adaptive, homogenous, asynchronous quorum‐based MAC protocol. In this protocol, certain sensor nodes belonging to a network will be allowed to tune their wake‐up and sleep intervals, based on their own traffic load. A new quorum system, named BiQuorum, is used by HQMAC to provide a low duty cycle, low network sensibility, and a high number of rendezvous points when compared with other quorum systems such as grid and dygrid. Both the theoretical results and the simulation results proved that the proposed HQMAC (when applied to a CDT) facilitates low transmission latency, high delivery ratio, and low energy consumption, thus extending the lifetime of the network it serves.