Energy efficient smart-relay-based cooperative MAC for wireless networks

An enormous number of papers investigated wireless cooperative networks over the last few years. Almost all have shown that cooperative transmission improves network performance significantly. However, none of these studies have considered the hidden and exposed terminal problems which appear due to the cooperative mechanisms of relay selection and transmission processes. The hidden terminal problems increase collisions and the exposed terminal problems increase bandwidth wastage, degrading the expected performance of cooperative networks. This paper addresses these problems of traditional wireless cooperative networks. We also propose a protocol called smart-relay-based-cooperative (SRcoop) MAC to optimally reduce the impacts of hidden and exposed terminal problems. We also illustrate an efficient relay selection mechanism that uses a back-up relay to increase transmission reliability. Our innovative model significantly improves the network throughput, end-to-end delay and energy efficiency over traditional cooperative MAC, 2rcMAC, LC-MAC, C-ARQ and Adere et al. protocols.     

Gossip-based cooperative caching for mobile applications in mobile wireless networks

Cooperative caching is an efficient way to improve the performance of data access in mobile wireless networks, by cache nodes selecting different data items in their limited storage in order to reduce total access delay. With more demands on sharing a video or other data, especially for mobile applications in an Internet-based Mobile Ad Hoc Network, considering the relations among data items in cooperative caching becomes more important than before. However, most of the existing works do not consider these inherent relations among data items, such as the logical, temporal, or spatial relations. In this paper, we present a novel solution, Gossip-based Cooperative Caching (GosCC) to address the cache placement problem, and consider the sequential relation among data items. Each mobile node stores the IDs of data items cached locally and the ID of the data item in use into its progress report. Each mobile node also makes use of these progress reports to determine whether a data item should be cached locally. These progress reports are propagated within the network in a gossip-based way. To improve the user experience, GosCC aims to provide users with an uninterrupted data access service. Simulation results show that GosCC achieves better performance than Benefit-based Data Caching and HybridCache, in terms of average interruption intervals and average interruption times, while sacrificing message cost to a certain degree.     

A cooperative CDMA-based multi-channel MAC protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

In this paper, we present CCM-MAC, a cooperative CDMA-based multi-channel medium access control (MAC) protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) in which each node has one half-duplex transceiver. The protocol mitigates the multi-channel hidden and exposed terminal problems by using information about channel usage gleaned from overhearing (cooperating) neighbours. By accounting for the multiple access interference, CCM-MAC also addresses the near-far problem of CDMA in MANETs enabling concurrent transmissions on each channel. We provide an analysis of the maximum throughput of CCM-MAC and validate it through simulation in Matlab. We also compare the throughput it achieves to IEEE 802.11, a multi-channel MAC protocol, and a CDMA-based MAC protocol.     

CCMAC: Coordinated cooperative MAC for wireless LANs

In wireless LANs, throughput is one of, if not the most, important performance metric. This metric becomes more critical at the bottleneck area of the network, which is normally the area around the Access Point (AP). In this paper, we propose CCMAC, a coordinated cooperative MAC for wireless LANs. It is designed to improve the throughput performance in the region near the AP through cooperative communication, where data is forwarded through a two-hop high data rate link instead of a low data rate direct link. The most unique feature is that, it can coordinate nodes to perform concurrent transmissions which can further increase the throughput. To optimize the performance, the coordination problem is formulated as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process and solved by a Reinforcement Learning algorithm. Through analysis and simulation, we show that CCMAC can significantly shorten the transmission time for stations with low data rate links to the AP and CCMAC has better throughput performance than other MAC protocols, such as CoopMAC and legacy IEEE 802.11.     

Enhanced MAC protocol to support multimedia traffic in cognitive wireless mesh networks

With the advanced physical layer techniques such as multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), transmission real-time 2D/3D contents and applications becomes more and more necessary in wireless networks for the amazing growing in demand of customers. However, the low efficiency of medium access control (MAC) protocol degrades the performance of real-time traffic greatly in multihop, wireless and mobile environment. Focusing on supporting real-time multimedia traffic in cognitive wireless mesh networks (WMNs), an enhanced MAC protocol is proposed. And the contribution of this paper is twofold: (1) An efficient carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) compatible time division multiple access (TDMA)-like MAC protocol called T-MAC is proposed, which aims to improve the system performance by allocating more channel access time in centralized manner and decreasing overhead. (2) An optimal adaptive scheduling scheme is proposed to support real-time multimedia applications and guarantee QoS for different priority traffic, which aims to find the optimized schedule among all possible sequences of concurrent transmissions by minimizing the occupied resources. Detailed simulation results and comparison with IEEE 802.11e MAC scheme show that the proposed T-MAC can effectively improve quality of service (QoS) for multimedia traffic in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay and packet loss rate, which also manifests that T-MAC is an efficient multimedia applications transmission scheme for mobile terminals and MAPs in cognitive WMNs.     

Directional communication with movement prediction in mobile wireless sensor networks

By introducing mobility to some or all the nodes in a wireless sensor network (WSN), WSN can enhance its capability and flexibility to support multiple missions. In mobile wireless sensor networks, mobile nodes collect data and send data to a sink station. When the sink station employs directional antennas to send and receive data, its communication capability can increase. Using directional antennas implies the transmitters must know the direction or location of the receiver. It is necessary to predict a mobile receiver’s movement to keep the transmitter’s antenna pointing to the right direction. A mobility prediction algorithm is proposed in this paper, which is based on the knowledge extracted from real vehicles traces. The validation experiments indicate that the prediction accuracy rate of the algorithm is 96.5 % and the communication using directional antenna with movement prediction saves about 92.6 % energy consumption with a suitable beam-width and shakehand interval.     

Key distribution scheme for peer-to-peer communication in mobile underwater wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) consist of small battery-limited devices called sensor nodes. The communication between sensor nodes is a type of peer-to-peer communication, since each node has the same capability and role. One of the recent application areas of these nodes is underwater sensing. Communication in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN) is challenging since radio frequencies cannot be used. Instead acoustic waves, which cause extra challenges, are used in UWSN. Since UWSNs are deployed in hostile environment, nodes can be captured by an adversary. In order to secure UWSNs, key distribution problem must be addressed. Moreover, UWSNs are inherently mobile since the nodes may be drifted in the sea. In this paper, we propose a key distribution model which is applied for two group mobility models, namely nomadic mobility model and meandering mobility model. In both schemes hierarchical structure is used and communication is handled via well-known Blom’s key distribution scheme. Our simulation results show that mobility causes some temporary decreases in the connectivity, but our schemes help to heal the connectivity performance in time. Moreover, our schemes show good resiliency performance such that capture of some nodes by an adversary only causes very small amount of links between uncaptured nodes to be compromised.     

一种低延时的无线传感器网络MAC协议

针对典型无线传感器网络X-MAC协议在多跳环境下累积延迟问题,提出一种具有低时延的Ex-MAC协议。利用管理邻居节点工作周期和虚通道算法,使得虚通道中的所有节点近似于同步,从而减少数据传输延迟,而且不需要交换同步控制帧。仿真结果与X-MAC协议相比,减少了端到端的延迟和数据包冲突的几率,提高了网络的吞吐量。     

An asynchronous MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

The MAC protocol for wireless sensor network plays a very important role in the control of energy consumption. It is a very important issue to effectively utilize power under the condition of limited energy. The most energy-wasting part of the MAC protocol for wireless sensor network is at the idling condition. Therefore it is crucial for power saving to be able to turn off the signal transducer of the wireless network when the equipment is idling. Pattern-MAC (PMAC) allows sensors that did not transfer for a long period of time to quickly enter a dormant state, so that the problem of sensor overhearing can be greatly improved, and the whole network structure can fully respond to the actual transfer rate without too much energy consumption, but this type of design requires precise time synchronization mechanism. Achieving time synchronization is a very energy consuming and very expensive mechanism in the sensor network structure, achieving the goal is coupled with excess energy consumption and reduction of the lifespan of the sensor. Additionally, the exchange action with the neighboring pattern after each cycle, not only generates additional energy consumption for data transfer, but is also accompanied by factors such as competition, collision and pattern exchange failure. We propose an asynchronous MAC protocol (AMAC) in this paper and expect to improve the problem of energy wasting and time synchronization due to sleeping schedule exchange under the PMAC basic protocol.     

Contention-free MAC protocols for asynchronous wireless sensor networks

A MAC protocol specifies how nodes in a sensor network access a shared communication channel. Desired properties of a MAC protocol are: it should be contention-free (avoid collisions); it should be distributed and self-stabilize to topological changes in the network; topological changes should be contained, namely, affect only the nodes in the vicinity of the change; it should not assume that nodes have a global time reference, that is, nodes may not be time-synchronized. We give a set of TDMA-based MAC protocols for asynchronous wireless sensor networks satisfying all of these requirements. The communication complexity, number and size of messages, for the protocols to stabilize is small, poly-logarithmic in the network size. A preliminary version of the paper appears in the Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Distributed Computing (DISC 2004), LNCS 3704, pp 245–259, Trippenhuis, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 2004.     

一种容迟移动传感器网络的MAC协议

根据容迟移动传感器网络中节点的能量消耗和传输延迟特性,提出一种减少能量消耗的媒体接入控制协议(ESMAC协议)。通过实验证明,依靠在MAC协议的帧结构中加入模式判别标识,减少了节点由于串音和竞争引起的能量消耗;通过节点发送的寻访报文,减少了由于空闲侦听引起的节点能量消耗,延长了网络的生命周期。     

An asynchronous scheduled MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) comprise a number of autonomous sensors and one or more sinks to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions. Energy efficiency is a key design factor of a MAC protocol for WSNs. Due to the importance of the problem, a number of energy efficient MAC protocols have been developed for WSNs. Preamble-sampling based MAC protocols (e.g., B-MAC and X-MAC) have overheads due to their preambles, and are inefficient at large wakeup intervals. SCP-MAC, a synchronous scheduled energy-efficient scheduling MAC protocol, minimizes the preamble by combining preamble sampling and scheduling techniques; however, it does not prevent energy loss due to overhearing; in addition, due to its synchronization procedure, it results in increased contention and delay. In this paper, we present an energy efficient MAC protocol for WSNs that avoids overhearing and reduces contention and delay by asynchronously scheduling the wakeup time of neighboring nodes. We provide an energy consumption analysis for multi-hop networks. To validate our design and analysis, we implement the proposed scheme in TinyOS. Experimental results show that AS-MAC considerably reduces energy consumption, packet loss and delay when compared with existing energy efficient MAC protocols.     

Optimal Hop Extended MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor MAC protocols, duty cycling has been exploited to put sensor nodes into sleeping state most of the time, thereby saving the limited battery efficiently. In this paper, we present a MAC protocol called Hop Extended MAC (HE-MAC) that enables a source node to transmit a data packet for multiple hops in a single duty cycle. It employs an EXP (Explorer) frame to set up the path for multiple hop transmission, which contains the information about the maximum number of hops that a packet can travel through in a single duty cycle. Using this information and an internal state of Ready-to-Receive (RTR), HE-MAC relays the packet beyond the termination of the data period. Along with our adaptive sleeping method, it additionally reduces power consumption. Then, we analytically obtain the packet latency of HE-MAC and find its optimal wakeup duration with respect to packet latency. Through ns-2 simulations, we observe that HE-MAC achieves 42.2% less power consumption and 23.6% less packet delay on average compared to RMAC [9] for a random topology of 300 nodes. With the allocated optimal wakeup duration, the latency of HE-MAC is reduced by 54.3% at maximum and 41.1% on average, compared to the case of default setting.     

A wireless sensor networks MAC protocol for real-time applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are designed for data gathering and processing, with particular requirements: low hardware complexity, low energy consumption, special traffic pattern support, scalability, and in some cases, real-time operation. In this paper we present the virtual TDMA for sensors (VTS) MAC protocol, which intends to support the previous features, focusing particularly on real-time operation. VTS adaptively creates a TDMA arrangement with a number of timeslots equal to the actual number of nodes in range. Thus, VTS achieves an optimal throughput performance compared to TDMA protocols with fixed size of frame. The frame is set up and maintained by a distributed procedure, which allows sensors to asynchronously join and leave the frame. In addition, duty cycle is increased or decreased in order to keep latency constant below a given deadline. Therefore, a major advantage of VTS is that it guarantees a bounded latency, which allows soft real-time applications.

一种多信道混合方式的无线传感器网络MAC协议

为了提高无线传感器网络的吞吐量,降低时延,本文设计了一种多信道MAC协议——MCHMAC。它采用调度和竞争访问机制相结的混合方式来传输信息,通过动态调整节点的活跃与睡眠状态的时长来节省能量。MCHMAC使用信道状态估计算法对信道进行评估,利用信道调度表来为节点调度状态最优的信道。仿真实验结果证明,本协议提高了吞吐量,降低了网络时延。     

无线传感器网络中一种竞争窗口自适应MAC协议

媒体访问控制(MAC)协议是保证无线传感器网络(WSNs)高效通信的关键网络协议之一。MAC层协议设计的是否合理将严重影响网络的性能。介绍了现有MAC协议分类和主要MAC协议。分析了WSNs中典型的S-MAC协议,针对S-MAC协议在载波侦听时采用固定竞争窗口的弊端,提出了一种新型的能够根据流量变化对竞争窗口进行动态调整的新的MAC协议ASMAC,利用NS2对ASMAC进行了仿真,证明了新的ASMAC不仅能够显著地提高吞吐量,降低时延,还能有效提高能量效率,在提高网络性能的同时达到节能的目的。     

Energy-efficient cooperative data aggregation for wireless sensor networks

Recently, cooperative communication mechanism is shown to be a promising technology to improve the transmit diversity only by a single transceiver antenna. Using this communication paradigm, multiple source nodes are able to coordinate their transmissions so as to obtain energy savings. As data aggregation is one of the most important operations in wireless sensor networks, this paper studies the energy-efficient data aggregation problem through cooperative communication. We first define the cooperative data aggregation (CDA) problem, and formally prove that this problem is NP-Hard. Due to the difficult nature of this problem, we propose a heuristic algorithm MCT for cooperative data aggregation. The theoretical analysis shows that this algorithm can reach the approximate performance ratio of 2. Moreover, the distributed implementation DMCT of the algorithm is also described. We prove that both centralized and distributed algorithms can construct the same topology for cooperative data aggregation. The experimental simulations show that the proposed algorithms will decrease the power consumption by about 12.5% and 66.3% compared with PEDAP and PEGASIS algorithms respectively.     

An energy-efficient,transport-controlled MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), one major cause of wasted energy is that the wireless network interface is always on to accept possible traffic. Many medium access control (MAC) protocols therefore adopted a periodic listen-and-sleep scheme to save energy, at sacrifice of end-to-end latency and throughput. Another cause is packet dropping due to network congestion, necessitating a lightweight transport protocol for WSNs. In this paper, we suggest a transport-controlled MAC protocol (TC-MAC) that combines the transport protocol into the MAC protocol with the aims of achieving high performance as well as energy efficiency in multi-hop forwarding. Although TC-MAC also works through a periodic listen-and-sleep scheme, it lowers end-to-end latency by reserving data forwarding schedules across multi-hop nodes during the listen period and by forwarding data during the sleep period, all while increasing throughput by piggybacking the subsequent data forwarding schedule on current data transmissions and forwarding data consecutively. In addition, TC-MAC gives a fairness-aware lightweight transport control mechanism based on benefits of using the MAC-layer information. The results show that TC-MAC performs as well as an 802.11-like MAC in end-to-end latency and throughput, and is more efficient than S-MAC in energy consumption, with the additional advantage of supporting fairness-aware congestion control.     

基于生成树的无线传感器网络MAC协议

简要分析了无线传感器网络(W SNs)MAC层协议,针对MAC协议在节能和时延方面的不足,提出了一种基于生成树的MAC协议(ST-MAC)。以汇聚点为根节点,创建一个由网络中所有节点组成的生成树。ST-MAC采用TDMA接入方式,其固有的低工作周期提高了网络性能。性能分析和实验结果表明:相对S-MAC,ST-MAC在能量节省和时延方面有较好的效果。