An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol Using Dynamic Queue Management for Delay-Tolerant Mobile Sensor Networks

Jie Li,Qiyue Li,Yugui Qu,Baohua Zhao

doi:10.3390/s110201847

Abstract

Conventional MAC protocols for wireless sensor network perform poorly when faced with a delay-tolerant mobile network environment. Characterized by a highly dynamic and sparse topology, poor network connectivity as well as data delay-tolerance, delay-tolerant mobile sensor networks exacerbate the severe power constraints and memory limitations of nodes. This paper proposes an energy-efficient MAC protocol using dynamic queue management (EQ-MAC) for power saving and data queue management. Via data transfers initiated by the target sink and the use of a dynamic queue management strategy based on priority, EQ-MAC effectively avoids untargeted transfers, increases the chance of successful data transmission, and makes useful data reach the target terminal in a timely manner. Experimental results show that EQ-MAC has high energy efficiency in comparison with a conventional MAC protocol. It also achieves a 46% decrease in packet drop probability, 79% increase in system throughput, and 25% decrease in mean packet delay.

Highlights

At present, most wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, i.e., networks composed of large numbers of distributed sensor nodes that sample data, are limited to static sensor nodes
Numerical results are presented to show that EQ-MAC with receiver-initiated data transmission scheme outperforms AS-MAC which is commonly used in the traditional wireless sensor network in energy efficiency
The results show that with the same receiver-initiated transmission scheme, EQ-MAC employing the dynamic queue management strategy can improve the probability of success in data transmission

Summary

Introduction

Most wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, i.e., networks composed of large numbers of distributed sensor nodes that sample data, are limited to static sensor nodes. Such networks are good for natural environment monitoring and medical treatment, but their mechanisms are not sufficient for sensor applications [1,2] of sparse (low node density) networks that may appear in the future. They cannot deal with sensor node mobility. These characteristics pose the following challenges for the design of MAC protocols

Methods

Results

Conclusion