MAC specifications for a WPAN allowing both energy saving and guaranteed delay* (original) (raw)

Specifications and Evaluation of a MAC Protocol for a LP-WPAN

Ad Hoc & Sensor Wireless Networks, 2009

Industrials have been increasingly interested in wireless sensor and actuator networks to monitor and control installations. The recent IEEE 802.15.4 standard has been developed to address vital issues of these networks, such as limited battery power and low processing capabilities. However, the standard does not meet all the requirements of industrial networks. For example, only some of the IEEE 802.15.4 nodes save energy. Also, this standard suffers from beacon frame collisions. In this paper, we describe MaCARI, a deterministic MAC layer protocol which allows all nodes to save energy and avoids the beacon frame collisions. We discuss several optimizations to increase the performance of the protocol or to offer QoS features. We evaluated the main components of MaCARI using a simulation and a prototype on a real hardware platform in order to prove their feasibility.

An energy efficient and delay sensitive centralized MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Computer Standards & Interfaces, 2008

Energy consumption is one of the most crucial design issues in wireless sensor networks since prolonging the network lifetime depends on the efficient management of sensing node energy resource. In this research study, a new TDMA based MAC protocol, which is not only energy aware but also delay sensitive, is introduced for wireless sensor networks. In the proposed MAC, to achieve energy conservation, sensing nodes employing the proposed MAC sleeps periodically to reduce duty cycle and minimize idle listening. In addition, to provide lower message delay, any time critical sensing node requests extra time slots form the central node when its queue size exceeds the upper threshold value. Unlike common wireless sensor network models with a multi-hop topology, the proposed WSN architecture has a centralized structure especially for energy efficiency and fulfillment of the delay requirement of time critical networking applications. The proposed MAC has been modeled and simulated using OPNET Modeler Software for performance evaluation. Simulation results of the WSN model employing the new MAC are also presented including comparisons with those of a WSN counterpart employing conventional IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC protocol. By varying the interarrival time between 1 and 8 s for 100 wireless sensing nodes, in the best case, as a consequence of the new scheduling algorithms developed 9448 times better end to end message delay result and 1.9 times lower energy consumption ratio have been obtained for WSN employing the proposed MAC when compared with the WSN model employing IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC.

A real-time and energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

International Journal of Ultra Wideband Communications and Systems, 2009

Energy saving has been the primal issue in designing medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, with the advent of new micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technologies and recently thermo-powered and solar-powered sensor nodes-where nodes operate virtually for an unlimited time period-the research community is set to experience many diverse directions in this area. Factors like timeliness, scalability, synchronisation, adaptivity and reliability will play their part in the near future. This paper discusses AREA-MAC, a MAC protocol specially designed for real-time and energy-efficient WSN applications. AREA-MAC reduces latency and energy consumption of nodes by using low power listening (LPL) technique with short preamble messages. Other protocols like B-MAC use long preamble messages that cause higher latency, energy consumption and control overhead. Moreover, AREA-MAC provides reasonable trade-offs between vital parameters such as system fairness, throughput, scalability and adaptability to traffic conditions. Additionally, to minimise network latency and to maximise its lifetime, two application-based optimisation problems are formulated. The analytical and simulation results show a better performance of AREA-MAC in terms of delay, energy-efficiency, throughput and overhearing over the protocols which use LPL with long preambles.

Energy-Efficient MAC Protocols for IEEE 802.15.4-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent advancements in information and communication technologies, are paving the way for new paradigms in embedded computing systems. This, allied with the evolution of electronic devices that has been historically witnessed through increased miniaturization, is pushing forward the design of new Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) infrastructures that will introduce us to the era of world instrumentation and transform every facet of our lives.

An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes S-MAC, a medium-access control (MAC) protocol designed for wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices. A network of these devices will collaborate for a common application such as environmental monitoring. We expect sensor networks to be deployed in an ad hoc fashion, with individual nodes remaining largely inactive for long periods of time, but then becoming suddenly active when something is detected. These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC that is different from traditional wireless MACs such as IEEE 802.11 in almost every way: energy conservation and self-configuration are primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important. S-MAC uses three novel techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self-configuration. To reduce energy consumption in listening to an idle channel, nodes periodically sleep. Neighboring nodes form virtual clusters to auto-synchronize on sleep schedules. Inspired by PAMAS, S-MAC also sets the radio to sleep during transmissions of other nodes. Unlike PAMAS, it only uses in-channel signaling. Finally, S-MAC applies message passing to reduce contention latency for sensor-network applications that require store-andforward processing as data move through the network. We evaluate our implementation of S-MAC over a sample sensor node, the Mote, developed at University of California, Berkeley. The experiment results show that, on a source node, an 802.11-like MAC consumes 2-6 times more energy than S-MAC for traffic load with messages sent every 1-10s.

Proposing a New MAC Layer Schedule with the Aim of Reducing Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent advances in the field of electronics and wireless telecommunications have created the capability and potential for designing and manufacturing sensors which have low power consumption, small size, reasonable price and various applications. These small sensors, which based on their type, can perform different tasks such as receiving environmental information, processing it and then sending that information, have shaped an idea to create and expand networks known as wireless sensor network (WSN). A sensor network consists of a large number of sensor nodes which are widely distributed in the environment and are engaged in collecting information. The sensors have significant limitations, and one of the most important limitations is the low capacity of these sensors' battery, which makes the efficient use of the energy a vital issue. When the energy in the battery ends, the sensor, functions completely stops. This would result in the loss of a part of the network. Moreover, in most of the sensor, applications, replacing the battery is impossible either because the evaluated area is too large or because it is unsafe. Therefore, minimizing the energy consumption, by designing communication protocols and applications for these networks, is one of the most important issues. So designing a MAC Layer schedule to reduce energy consumption in wireless sensor networks which can significantly reduce power consumption but also would be compatible with IEEE 802.15.4 is an important and unavoidable challenge.

MAC protocols for low-latency and energy-efficient WSN applications

2009

Most of medium access control (MAC) protocols proposed for wireless sensor networks (WSN) are targeted only for single main objective, the energy efficiency. Other critical parameters such as low-latency, adaptivity to traffic conditions, scalability, system fairness, and bandwidth utilization are mostly overleaped or dealt as secondary objectives. The demand to address those issues increases with the growing interest in cheap, low-power, low- distance, and embedded WSNs. In this report, along with other vital parameters, we discuss suitability and limitations of different WSN MAC protocols for time critical and energy-efficient applications. As an example, we discuss the working of IEEE 802.15.4 in detail, explore its limitations, and derive efficient application-specific network parameter settings for time, energy, and bandwidth critical applications. Eventually, a new WSN MAC protocol Asynchronous Real-time Energy-efficient and Adaptive MAC (AREA-MAC) is proposed, which is intend...

MAC Protocols for Application-Specific Wireless Sensor Networks : A Study

Subsequent to introduction of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) it remain an active research topic due to their wide variety applications in areas such as healthcare, military, monitoring, surveillance and many more systems. In most applications, sensor nodes are inhibited in energy supply and communication bandwidth. Therefore, novel techniques to reduce energy inefficiencies and for efficient use of the limited bandwidth resources are essential. Such constraints combined with intense network operation create several challenges to the design and management of WSNs and require energy-consciousness at all layers of the networking protocol stack. For example at the Data-Link layer, low duty cycle Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols trade off latency for energy efficient operation. In this paper, we present a survey of modern low duty cycle MAC protocols. We first summarize the design challenges for MAC protocols in WSNs. Then, we present a widespread survey of the most important and recent MAC protocols. These protocols are classified into synchronous and asynchronous based on their mode of operation. Finally, the paper emphasizes open research problems in MAC layer for WSNs.

A novel MAC scheduler to minimize the energy consumption in a Wireless Sensor Network

Ad Hoc Networks, 2014

The rising success of the Internet of Things has led the Wireless Sensor Networks to play an important role in many fields, ranging from military to civilian applications. However, since sensor nodes are battery powered, communication protocols and applications for these networks must be carefully designed in order to limit the power consumption. In this work, a new MAC protocol able to significantly reduce the power consumption and compatible with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, is designed and validated. The defined protocol is based on an efficient setting of the node's duty cycle as a function of the transmission times of the neighbor nodes. In a duty cycle period, each node wakes up once to transmit and N times to receive, where N is the number of neighbors, while it remains in sleep mode for the rest of the time. The defined protocol has been validated through both an analytical and a simulative approach. By using the first approach, the proposed solution is compared with another energy-efficient protocol, namely AS-MAC; then, the differences between the simulated scenario and the analytical one are analyzed. By using the second approach (through Omnet++ simulator), we carried out a performance comparison between our protocol and the current MAC protocol compliant with the ZigBee standard. All the results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed solution, which has proved to be flexible and efficient, since it is able to provide high energy savings at different date rate, without a negative impact on the packets delivery.

IEEE 802.15.4: a Federating Communication Protocol for Time-Sensitive Wireless Sensor Networks

2006

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been attracting increasing interests for developing a new generation of embedded systems with great potential for many applications such as surveillance, environment monitoring, emergency medical response and home automation. However, the communication paradigms in WSNs differ from the ones attributed to traditional wireless networks, triggering the need for new communication protocols. In this context, the recently standardised IEEE 802.15.4 protocol presents some potentially interesting features for deployment in wireless sensor network applications, such as powerefficiency, timeliness guarantees and scalability. Nevertheless, when addressing WSN applications with (soft/hard) timing requirements some inherent paradoxes emerge, such as power-efficiency versus timeliness, triggering the need of engineering solutions for an efficient deployment of IEEE 802.15.4 in WSNs. In this chapter, we will explore the most relevant characteristics of the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol for wireless sensor networks and present the most important challenges regarding time-sensitive WSN applications. We also provide some timing performance and analysis of the IEEE 802.15.4 that unveil some directions for resolving the previously mentioned paradoxes.