Duty-cycled Medium Access Control Protocol Research Articles

Empirical Analysis of Extended QX-MAC for IOT-Based WSNS

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects our world in more ways than we imagine. Wireless sensor network (WSN) technology is at the core of implementing IoT architectures. Although WSN applications give us enormous opportunities, their deployment is challenging because of the energy constraint in sensor nodes. The primary design objective of WSNs is therefore to maximize energy efficiency. Enhancing network quality of service (QoS), such as latency, is another crucial factor, particularly for different delay-sensitive applications. Medium access control (MAC) protocols are of paramount importance to achieve these targets. Over the years, several duty-cycled MAC protocols were proposed. Among them, the strobed preamble approach introduced in X-MAC has gained much interest in IoT field because of its several theoretical advantages. However, X-MAC is highly efficient only under light traffic. Under heavy traffic, X-MAC incurs high per-packet overhead and extra delay. In addition, X-MAC has several design flaws that can significantly degrade network performance. In this paper, we point out some specific malfunctions in the original X-MAC design and propose alternatives to reduce their impact. We present an energy-efficient, traffic-adaptive MAC protocol called QX-MAC that addresses the foreseen shortcomings in X-MAC. QX-MAC integrates Q-learning and the more bit scheme to enable the nodes to adapt the active period and duty cycle in accordance with incoming traffic. Finally, the performance of QX-MAC is thoroughly analyzed compared with other reference protocols to validate its efficacy. Our QX-MAC simulation results demonstrate substantial improvements in overall network performance in terms of energy consumption, packet loss, delay, or throughput.

A Scalable and Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Linear Sensor Networks

Linear topologies arise naturally in the context of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications for smart cities, where the infrastructure itself commonly has a linear or semi-linear structure. This is the case of buildings, public transportation systems, road infrastructure, and utility distribution networks. Given the prevalence of this type of topologies, several Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols have been designed to take advantage of their particular properties. Unfortunately, most of them do not scale well as the node density and the distance in hops to the sink increases. The result is that packets generated many hops away from the sink tend to experience unacceptable high end-to-end delay and low delivery probabilities. This paper introduces HP-MAC, a synchronized duty-cycled MAC protocol for Linear Sensor Networks (LSNs) that assigns transmission priorities to nodes to avoid collisions, through the implementation of distributed elections based on hash functions. HP-MAC also implements a packet queuing scheme that acts as a mechanism to control the amount of network resources allocated to data flows generated at different distances to the sink. This way, packets can reach their destination with loss probability and end-to-end delay that do not depend on their distance to the sink. We use a Discrete-Time Markov Chain (DTMC) to model the performance of the proposed protocol. Numerical solutions of this model show that HP-MAC outperforms state-of-the-art representatives in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, power consumption, and packet loss probability. These results are validated through extensive discrete-event simulations.

A synchronous duty-cycled reservation based MAC protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks

To design an energy-efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for the Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) is an urgent research issue since depleted batteries cannot be recharged or replaced in the underwater environment. Moreover, the underwater acoustic channels are affected by hindrances such as long propagation delay and limited bandwidth, which appear in the design of the MAC protocol for the UWSNs. The available MAC protocols for the terrestrial wireless sensor networks exhibit low performance in energy efficiency, throughput and reliability in the UWSNs, and cannot be used in the UWSNs directly because of their unique characteristics. This paper proposes a synchronous duty-cycled reservation-based MAC protocol named Ordered Contention MAC (OCMAC) protocol. The basic mechanism of this protocol is to schedule data transmission by transmitters through the scheduling of Ready To Send (RTS) frames. The protocol eliminates the possible collision during data transmission and improves communication efficiency. The paper analyzes the performance in energy efficiency, throughput and reliability of the protocol by modeling the queuing behavior of OCMAC with a Markov Chain process. Furthermore, the analytical model is validated through a simulation study. The analysis results demonstrated that while providing good throughput and reliability, OCMAC can achieve energy saving.

A Survey on the Evolution of Opportunistic Routing with Asynchronous Duty-Cycled MAC in Wireless Sensor Networks.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been used for environmental monitoring and reporting for many decades. Energy consumption is a significant research topic because wireless sensor nodes are battery-operated to be highly energy-constrained. Several strategies have been introduced in routing and MAC (Medium Access Control) layer protocols to facilitate energy saving. At the routing layer, an energy-efficient routing protocol, known as opportunistic routing (OR), has been designed to improve efficiency. OR achieves energy efficiency via load-balancing, which forwards packets along multiple routes over WSNs. At the MAC layer, an energy-efficient MAC protocol known as the asynchronous duty-cycled MAC (ADCM) protocol achieves energy saving by turning on and off a sensor node’s transmitter and receiver to eliminate unnecessary energy wastage. These protocols each have their own advantages and disadvantages. OR achieves energy efficiency at the routing layer but it raises an issue at the MAC layer. ADCM achieves energy efficiency at the MAC layer, but it hinders the packet forwarding efficiency of the OR. To attain better energy efficiency, a combination of these two ideas led to the development of OR with asynchronous duty-cycled MAC (OR-ADCM). However, even with better energy efficiency, limitations still exist in combining load-balancing and duty-cycling due to conflicts in the inherent properties of OR and ADCM. In this paper, we present a survey of the evolution of OR-ADCM over WSNs to help the reader better understand and appreciate the details of this tradeoff, which we hope will lead to the development of better protocol designs.

Intelligent Sharing for LTE and WiFi Systems in Unlicensed Bands: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Operating LTE networks in unlicensed bands together with legacy WiFi systems is deemed as a promising technique to support explosively growing mobile traffic. In conventional LTE/WiFi spectrum sharing schemes, LTE systems need to know WiFi traffic demands for optimizing system parameters to protect WiFi systems, for which the two systems are required to cooperate with each other via signallings exchanges. However, it is difficult to establish a dedicated channel among the two independent systems for exchanging signallings. Hence, in this paper, we propose an intelligent duty-cycle medium access control protocol to realize the effective and fair spectrum sharing between LTE and WiFi systems without requiring signalling exchanges. Specifically, we first design a duty-cycle spectrum sharing framework, which allows an LTE system to share the spectrum with a WiFi system by using time sharing. After that, we develop deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based algorithms to learn WiFi traffic demands by analyzing WiFi channel activity, e.g., the idleness/business of WiFi channels, which can be observed by the LTE system via monitoring WiFi channels. Based on the learnt knowledge, the LTE system can adaptively optimize LTE transmission time to maximize its own throughput and meanwhile to provide sufficient protection to the WiFi system. Simulation results show that, in terms of LTE throughput and WiFi protection, the performance of the proposed intelligent scheme can approach that of the genie-aided exhaustive search algorithm, which needs the perfect knowledge of WiFi traffic demands through massive signalling exchanges and is of high computational complexity.

A Wake-Up Radio-Based MAC Protocol for Autonomous Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with energy harvesting capabilities have drawn increasing attention in the last few years, as they enable long-term monitoring applications. However, the level of power harvested is usually limited to few mW. To improve the energy efficiency of WSNs, many power management techniques have been proposed to adjust the quality of service according to the harvested energy fluctuations. As wireless communications consume a major fraction of the available energy, numerous medium access control (MAC) protocols have been proposed to minimize energy consumption, latency, and data collisions. In this paper, we present an innovative MAC protocol for energy-harvesting based WSNs exploiting ultralow-power wake-up radios. To overcome the limited range typical of wake-up radios, a multi-hop wake-up scheme based on a dual radio system is proposed enabling asynchronous communications between a base station and any node of the network while maintaining a low latency and a high energy efficiency. To reduce energy consumption, wake-up calls and data packets are transmitted using two distinct data rates. Combined with destination address decoding, using a higher data rate for data transmission also minimizes the risk of collisions. Our approach has been applied to monitoring applications composed of autonomous sensor nodes powered by indoor light energy. OMNeT++ simulation results demonstrate the benefits of our wake-up radio-based approach in terms of energy, latency, and collisions when compared with the state-of-the-art duty-cycled MAC protocols. Experiments performed with real WSN platforms equipped with a wake-up radio prototype confirm the efficiency of our approach.

Comparative analysis of contention based and TDMA based MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have been widely considered as one of the most important technologies that promises wide range of applications in the field of medical, military, environment, home, agriculture, etc. A variety of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks. This paper presents the comparative analysis of two MAC protocols–RI-MAC, receiver initiated asynchronous duty cycle MAC protocol which is a contention based protocol and ATMA, advertisement-based TDMA MAC protocol. The two MAC protocols are analyzed using four performance parameters such as end to end delay, throughput, packet delivery ratio and energy consumption.

Evaluation of a duty-cycled asynchronous X-MAC protocol for vehicular sensor networks

An asynchronous medium access control (MAC) duty-cycled protocols have higher energy efficiency and lower packet latency than synchronized ones due to reduced idle listening. Moreover, they provide efficient utilization of energy supplied to mobile sensors. They are considered very important in MAC protocols due to the adverse effects of hidden terminals which causes energy consumption in sensor networks. Therefore, in this paper, the impact of hidden terminals on the performance of an asynchronous duty-cycled MAC protocol X-MAC for vehicle-base sensor is investigated via analysis and simulations. We propose a Markov model to analyze the quality-of-service (QoS) parameters in terms of energy consumption, delay, and throughput. Our analytical model provides QoS parameter values that closely match the simulation results under various network conditions. Our model is more computationally efficient and provides accurate results quickly compared with simulations. More importantly, our model enables the designers to obtain a better understanding of the effects of different numbers of mobile sensor nodes and data arrival rates on the performance of an asynchronous MAC duty-cycled protocol.

Has Time Come to Switch From Duty-Cycled MAC Protocols to Wake-Up Radio for Wireless Sensor Networks?

Duty-cycled Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols certainly improve the energy efficiency of wireless networks. However, most of these protocols still suffer from severe degrees of overhearing and idle listening. These two issues prevent optimum energy usage, a crucial aspect in energy-constrained wireless networks such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Wake-up radio (WuR) systems drastically reduce these problems by completely switching off the nodes' microcontroller unit (MCU) and main radio transceiver until a secondary, extremely low-power receiver is triggered by a particular wireless transmission, the so called wake-up call. Unfortunately, most WuR studies focus on theoretical platforms and/or custom-built simulators. Both these factors reduce the associated usefulness of the obtained results. In this paper, we model and simulate a real, recent, and promising WuR hardware platform developed by the authors. The simulation model uses time and energy consumption values obtained in the laboratory and does not rely on custom-built simulation engines, but rather on the OMNET++ simulator. The performance of the WuR platform is compared to four of the most well-known and widely employed MAC protocols for WSN under three real-world network deployments. The paper demonstrates how the use of our WuR platform presents numerous benefits in several areas, from energy efficiency and latency to packet delivery ratio and applicability, and provides the essential information for serious consideration of switching duty-cycled MAC-based networks to WuR.

WBAN Energy Efficiency and Dependability Improvement Utilizing Wake-Up Receiver

This paper discusses the perspectives of using a wake-up receiver (WUR) in wireless body area network (WBAN) applications with event-driven data transfers. First we compare energy efficiency between the WUR-based and the duty-cycled medium access control protocol -based IEEE 802.15.6 compliant WBAN. Then, we review the architectures of state-of-the-art WURs and discuss their suitability for WBANs. The presented results clearly show that the radio frequency envelope detection based architecture features the lowest power consumption at a cost of sensitivity. The other architectures are capable of providing better sensitivity, but consume more power. Finally, we propose the design modification that enables using a WUR to receive the control commands beside the wake-up signals. The presented results reveal that use of this feature does not require complex modifications of the current architectures, but enables to improve energy efficiency and latency for small data blocks transfers.

Synchronous receiver initiated MAC protocol for long-lived sensor networks

In this paper, we discuss the design of a new Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, SRI-MAC (Synchronous Receiver Initiated MAC), for wireless sensor networks whose goal is to extend the lifetime of the network by avoiding major energy waste causes, such as collisions, overhearing and idle listening.SRI-MAC is designed on the basis of synchronized duty cycled MAC protocols. The nodes in SRI-MAC synchronize each other to avoid data packet collisions. SRI-MAC uses receiver-initiated data transmission in order to efficiently and effectively operate over a wide range of traffic loads. It employs an adaptive beacon and a series of RTS/CTS (Request To Send/Clear To Send) packets to reduce duty cycle and minimize idle listening. In SRI-MAC, the senders remain active and wait silently until the receiver explicitly signifies when to start data transmission by sending CTS packet. If the node is not the intended sender, it returns to sleep immediately and continues its sleep as if the medium had been idle. Analytical and Simulation results show that SRI-MAC reduces the energy consumption and achieves an obvious improvement on the network lifetime.

SR-MAC: A Low Latency MAC Protocol for Multi-Packet Transmissions in Wireless Sensor Networks

Event detection is one of the major applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Most of existing medium access control (MAC) protocols are mainly optimized for the situation under which an event only generates one packet on a single sensor node. When an event generates multiple packets on a single node, the performance of these MAC protocols degrades rapidly. In this paper, we present a new synchronous duty-cycle MAC protocol called SR-MAC for the event detection applications in which multiple packets are generated on a single node. SR-MAC introduces a new scheduling mechanism that reserves few time slots during the SLEEP period for the nodes to transmit multiple packets. By this approach, SR-MAC can schedule multiple packets generated by an event on a single node to be forwarded over multiple hops in one operational cycle without collision. We use event delivery latency (EDL) and event delivery ratio (EDR) to measure the event detection capability of the SR-MAC protocol. Through detailed ns-2 simulation, the results show that SR-MAC can achieve lower EDL, higher EDR and higher network throughput with guaranteed energy efficiency compared with R-MAC, DW-MAC and PR-MAC.

Modeling and Performance Analysis for Duty-Cycled MAC Protocols with Applications to S-MAC and X-MAC

Wireless sensor networks are often battery-powered, and hence extending the network lifetime is one of the primary concerns in the ubiquitous deployment of wireless sensor networks. One approach to efficiently utilize the limited energy supplies of the sensors is to have the medium access control (MAC) protocol duty-cycle the sensors, periodically putting the sensors to sleep and waking them up to reduce idle listening, which is energy intensive. Among duty-cycled MAC protocols, some protocols are synchronized so that nodes wake up at the same time in each cycle, and other protocols are asynchronous, where nodes have arbitrary offsets to start their cycles. For protocol designers, it is important to understand which type of duty-cycled MAC protocol should be chosen (synchronized or asynchronous), as well as what values should be assigned to the protocol parameters under a given network scenario in order to achieve a desirable performance for throughput, delay, or energy consumption. However, previous work to analyze the performance of different duty-cycled MAC protocols is either protocol-specific, or limited to one aspect of the performance metric. In this paper, we propose a Markov queuing model to analyze the throughput, delay, and energy consumption of both synchronized and asynchronous duty-cycled MAC protocols with applications to S-MAC and X-MAC. Our contributions include: 1) proposing a Markov queuing model to describe the queuing behavior of both synchronous and asynchronous duty-cycled nodes, 2) modeling the queue dynamics and the stationary probability of packet transmissions for S-MAC, a synchronized duty-cycled MAC protocol, to analyze its performance, 3) modeling the queue dynamics and the stationary probability of packet transmissions for X-MAC, an asynchronous duty-cycled MAC protocol, to analyze its performance, 4) providing comprehensive performance estimation and comparison for different duty-cycled MAC protocols, and 5) providing flexibility to tradeoff different performance metrics by optimizing the protocol parameters. Our model results are validated by comparing with NS-2 and Matlab simulations.

NW-MAC: multiple wake-up provisioning in asynchronously scheduled duty cycle MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

To reduce the energy cost of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the duty cycle (i.e., periodic wake-up and sleep) concept has been used in several medium access control (MAC) protocols. Although these protocols are energy efficient, they are primarily designed for low-traffic environments and therefore sacrifice delay in order to maximize energy conservation. However, many applications having both low and high traffic demand a duty cycle MAC that is able to achieve better energy utilization with minimum energy loss ensuring delay optimization for timely and effective actions. In this paper, nW-MAC is proposed; this is an asynchronously scheduled and multiple wake-up provisioned duty cycle MAC protocol for WSNs. The nW-MAC employs an asynchronous rendezvous schedule selection technique to provision a maximum of n wake-ups in the operational cycle of a receiver. The proposed MAC is suitable to perform in both low- and high-traffic applications using a reception window-based medium access with a specific RxOp. Furthermore, per cycle multiple wake-up concept ensures optimum energy consumption and delay maintaining a higher throughput, as compare to existing mechanisms. Through analysis and simulations, we have quantified the energy-delay performance and obtained results that expose the effectiveness of nW-MAC.