Efficient Medium Access Control Research Articles

Scheduling based on residual energy of sensors to extend the lifetime of network in wireless sensor network

The maximum amount of sensor energy is consumed during broadcasting. Hence in order to make delay with the network lifetime of a wireless sensor network (WSN), there is a need of optimum utilization of sensor energy. Scheduling in media access control (MAC) layer plays a critical role in the designing of WSN to avoid collision and conserve more energy. The Distributed energy aware MAC (DE-MAC) is one such efficient and feasible MAC protocol that addresses the energy management issues in WSN. This work proposes an extension of DE-MAC framework by allocating varying period slots to the nodes based on their residual energy level. Energy of all the nodes is exchanged at regular intervals. Accordingly, the nodes with low energy are allocated less time slots for broadcast and are made to sleep for more time. Simulation is carried out using NS2 (network simulator 2) and the efficiency and performance results are compared with DE-MAC for analysis. Improvement in performance for various parameters such as residual energy, throughput, and packet delivery ratio can be observed.

Enhanced Clustering MAC Protocol Based on Learning Automata for UV Networks

Ultraviolet (UV) networks are widely applied in complex electromagnetic environments. Designing an efficient multi-node medium access control (MAC) protocol for these networks is important. In this study, we proposed an enhanced clustering time division multiple access (TDMA) MAC protocol based on clustering and learning automata (LA). Subsequently, the effects of the network topology, class of service, and number of cluster nodes on the network performance under the proposed protocol were analyzed. Then, the protocol was compared with the TDMA protocol and clustering system. Results revealed that it obtained a better network performance, proving its suitability for multi-node UV networking.

A Novel Framed Slotted Aloha Medium Access Control Protocol Based on Capture Effect in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The capture effect is a frequently observed phenomenon in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) communication. When conflicts arise during time slot access, failure to access does not necessarily occur; instead, successful access may still be achieved. The capture effect can enhance the likelihood of multiple access and improve communication efficiency. The security of VANETs communication is undoubtedly the primary concern. One crucial approach to enhance security involves the design of an efficient and reliable medium access control (MAC) protocol. Taking into account both aspects, we propose a novel framed slotted Aloha (FSA) MAC protocol model. Firstly, we derive the closed-form expression for the capture probability in the Rician fading channel in this paper. Subsequently, we analyze how the number of vehicles and time slots influence the success probability of vehicle access channels as well as examine the impact of the capture effect on this success probability. Then, under constraints regarding vehicle access channel success probability, we derive optimal values for slot numbers, access times, and transmission power while proposing a comprehensive implementation method to ensure high access channel success probabilities. We verify both theoretical derivations and proposed methods through simulation experiments.

Efficient Node Insertion Algorithm for Connectivity-Based Multipolling MAC Protocol in Wi-Fi Sensor Networks

Since low-power Wi-Fi sensors are connected to the Internet, effective radio spectrum use is crucial for developing an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Wi-Fi sensor networks. A connectivity-based multipolling mechanism was employed for Access Points to grant uplink transmission opportunities to Wi-Fi nodes with a reduced number of multipolling frame transmissions. The existing connectivity-based multipolling mechanism in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs with many nodes may require excessive time to derive the optimal number of serially connected sequences due to the backtracking algorithm based on the Traveling Salesman Problem model. This limitation hinders the real-time implementation of the connectivity-based multipolling mechanism in Wi-Fi sensor networks. In this study, an efficient node insertion algorithm is proposed, by which the number of derived serially connected multipolling sequences that cover nodes in Wi-Fi sensor networks converges to only one as the number of Wi-Fi sensors increases in Wi-Fi sensor networks. As verified by simulation experiments for Wi-Fi sensor networks, the proposed node insertion algorithm produces a near-optimal number of multipolling sequences that cover the nodes in Wi-Fi sensor networks. This study proposes a node insertion algorithm for the real-time implementation of the connectivity-based multipolling mechanism in MAC protocol for Wi-Fi sensor networks.

Implementation of Efficient Mac Protocols for wireless Senosrs in WBA Networks

Abstract: Various medical applications consisting of heterogeneous requirements are supported by WBA networks. For reliable data transmission it is required to use an efficient medium access control protocol. Here, in this project, a dynamic Super frame structure-based MAC protocol is proposed by extending the standard principles from IEEE 802.15.6 which is a standard protocol, a mechanism for allocating dedicated slots with prioritization is used which is known to be Criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation, inorderto assign the allocation of slots for every sensor device. Values of sensor devices are calculated based on different sensors parameters by using CRITIC method. There by we compare our proposed work with the standard IEEE 802.15.6 MAC and other MAC protocols. By simulating it is shown that our proposed MAC protocol has performed better in Reliability, Throughput, Energy Efficiency and also Packet Delivery Delay. In the results it is shown that Reliability of data transmission has increased over more than 50% over the standard IEEE 802.15.6 MAC

An Energy-Efficient Multi-Channel Design for Distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

This article discusses the importance of designing an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to optimize energy consumption at the data link layer while transmitting high traffic applications. The proposed protocol, EE-MMAC, is an energy-efficient multichannel MAC that reduces energy consumption by minimizing idle listening, collisions, overhearing, and control packet overhead. EE-MMAC utilizes a directional antenna and periodically sleep technique in a multi-channel environment. Nodes exchange control packets on the control channel to choose a data channel and decide the beam direction of the flow. Simulation results show that EE-MMAC achieves significant energy gains (30% to 45% less than comparable IEEE 802.11 and MMAC) based on energy efficiency, packet delivery ratio, and throughput.

2DMAC: A Sustainable and Efficient Medium Access Control Mechanism for Future Wireless NoCs

Wireless Network-on-Chip (WNoC) requires a Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism for an interference-free sharing of the wireless channel. In traditional MAC, a token is circulated among the Wireless Interfaces (WIs) in a Round Robin manner. The WI with the token holds the channel for a fixed number of cycles. However, the channel requirement of the individual WIs dynamically changes over time due to the varying traffic density across the WNoC. Moreover, the conventional WNoCs give equal importance to all the traffic taking the wireless path and transmit it in an oldest-first manner. Nevertheless, the critical data can degrade the system performance to a large extent by delaying the application runtime if not served promptly. We propose 2DMAC, which can change the token arbitration pattern and tune the channel hold time of each WI based on its runtime traffic density and criticality status. Moreover, 2DMAC prioritizes the critical traffic over the non-critical traffic during the wireless data transfer. The proposed mechanism improves the wireless channel utilization by 15.67% and the network throughput by 29.83% and reduces the critical data latency by 29.77% over the traditional MAC.

Two-level frame aggregation with enhanced A-MPDU for signal-to-noise ratio efficiency in IEEE 802.11n WLANs

<p>One of the most important frame aggregation features for enhancing the speed of IEEE 802.11n wireless local area networks (WLANs) through sharing headers and timing overheads is an aggregate MAC protocol data unit (A-MPDU). However, because aggregation overhead affects A-MPDU frame size, the A-MPDU performance falls short of user expectations. The variable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is significantly decreased as a result of the influence of lost sub-frame on the volume of sub-frames that may be aggregated (the level of aggregation). In order to solve this issue, this study suggests an improved A-MPDU with reduced header overheads as well as a efficient two-level aggregation technique based on enhanced A-MPDU. To test the suggested plan, a simulation experiment was run on NS-3. The results show that the suggested two-level aggregation approach works better than the existing methods by achieving higher throughput, SNR, and a efficient medium access control (MAC) layer.</p>

Adaptive Scheduling MAC Protocol in Underwater Acoustic Broadcast Communications for AUV Formation

With the rapid development of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and the continuous improvement of marine exploration requirements, AUV formation has emerged as a promising technique for performing underwater tasks with greater flexibility, adaptability, and scalability. To achieve AUV formation control, underwater acoustic communication networks (UACNs) are widely used to support information exchange among AUVs. Considering broadcast communications in fully connected mobile UACNs, existing medium access control (MAC) protocols face severe packet collision risk or low reuse efficiency. To improve the timeliness and reliability of the information exchange among AUVs, we develop an efficient scheduling-based adaptive broadcasting MAC (AB-MAC) protocol. The AB-MAC protocol is incompletely centralized, which can be reflected in two aspects. First, to ensure the consistency of the transmission schedule in the network, the AB-MAC protocol selects a control node for each frame to schedule the transmission of all nodes according to the updated network topology. The slot lengths and transmission sequences are changeable in each frame to avoid packet collisions and minimize frame lengths. Second, to further improve the efficiency and robustness of the protocol, all nodes adaptively adjust their transmission time by integrating the information contained in their previously received control packets and ordinary packets. The transmission scheduling problem is formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem, which can be solved by our proposed improved Genetic Algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate that the AB-MAC protocol not only performs well in terms of network throughput and average update interval but also has a high level of robustness even in low-quality underwater acoustic channels.

RE-MAC: A Hybrid MAC Protocol for Underwater Multimedia Communication System

In this article, we propose a reliable and efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol, RE-MAC, for resource-constraint underwater acoustic multimedia communication systems. RE-MAC achieves scalability by utilizing a hybrid MAC protocol smartly, which takes advantage of contention, reservation, and null data packet (NDP) based channel access mechanisms. The proposed scheme achieves multihop communication and synchronization for video streaming using a transmission opportunity (TXOP) based efficient channel access mechanism at the access point (AP) and relay nodes. TXOP time has been utilized by relay and AP for sending stream of frames with low overhead. To improve the efficiency in multihop communication, RE-MAC finds an optimal frame duration for relays and AP. RE-MAC efficiently places the NDP mechanism replacing traditional ACK-based control packet exchange. We incorporate the TXOP in AP and relay nodes for multimedia streaming and sleep mode for stations. Further, the video compression technique gives the efficiency of our system to improve the transmission of multimedia data. Our proposed schemes help communicate multimedia data without compromising the quality of service. We have demonstrated our proposed scheme experimentally in a prototype. After that, a simulation-based detailed performance analysis is provided to see the scalability of the proposed scheme. Compared to the existing state-of-the-art solutions, RE-MAC significantly delivers the throughput, energy consumption, delay, and packet loss.

An Efficient Distributed MAC Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Many marine scientific and industrial applications in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) are characterized by dynamic-high load and dense deployment. In such UASNs, the channel reservation mechanism is devised to deal with channel utilization degradation. Unfortunately, channel reservation would lead to an increase in end-to-end delay and a decrease in throughput due to long propagation delay in UASNs. To reduce end-to-end delay and improve throughput, we proposed an efficient distributed medium access control (ED-MAC) protocol for UASNs. ED-MAC reduces the impact of long propagation delays on channel reservation by removing the channel reservation confirmation process and improving channel reservation efficiency. First, the optimized time slot length for the next time frame is obtained based on the data packet number estimate and secondary transmission data packet number, which could reduce idle waiting time. Then, the channel reservation confirmation process is removed by distributed channel reservation mechanism, and efficient channel reservation is achieved through channel reservation packet collision-free transmission and channel multiplexing. Meanwhile, channel reservation is performed before packet generation. Thus, the data packet waiting delay is reduced. Finally, a distributed data packet time slot schedule scheme is proposed to achieve collision avoidance between different data packets, as well as data packets and channel reservation packets. The performance analysis and simulation results show that our proposed ED-MAC could efficiently reduce end-to-end delay and improve throughput in dynamic-high-load and dense UASNs. Simulation results show that ED-MAC can achieve a maximum 98.7% reduction in average end-to-end delay and a maximum 61.1% improvement in throughput.

Implementation of Efficient MAC Protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks

Various medical applications consisting of heterogeneous requirements are supported by WBA networks. For reliable data transmission it is required to use an efficient medium access control protocol. Here, in this project, a dynamic Super frame structure-based MAC protocol is proposed by extending the standard principles from IEEE 802.15.6 which is a standard protocol, a mechanism for allocating dedicated slots with prioritization is used which is known to be Criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation, in order to assign the allocation of slots for every sensor device. Values of sensor devices are calculated based on different sensors parameters by using CRITIC method. There by we compare our proposed work with the standard IEEE 802.15.6 MAC and other MAC protocols. By simulating it is shown that our proposed MAC protocol has performed better in Reliability, Throughput, Energy Efficiency and Packet Delivery Delay. In the results it is shown that Reliability of data transmission has increased over more than 50% over the standard AIEEE 802.15.6 MAC.

Cross-Layer MAC/Routing Protocol for Reliability Improvement of the Internet of Things

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is recognized as one of the most successful for short-range low-rate wireless communications and is used in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. To improve the performance of wireless networks, interest in protocols that rely on interaction between different layers has increased. Cross-layer design has become an issue in wireless communication systems as it can improve the capacity of wireless networks by optimizing cooperation between multiple layers that constitute network systems. Power efficiency and network scalability must be addressed to spread IoT. In multi-hop networks, many devices share wireless media and are geographically distributed; consequently, efficient medium access control (MAC) and routing protocols are required to mitigate interference and improve reliability. Cross-layer design is a novel network design approach to support flexible layer techniques in IoT. We propose a cross-layer protocol for the MAC layer and routing layer to satisfy the requirements of various networks. The proposed scheme enables scalable and reliable mesh networking using the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and provides robust connectivity and efficient path discovery procedures. It also proposes a novel address-allocation technique to improve address-allocation methods that cannot support large sensor networks. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme could improve reliability and reduce end-to-end delay.

An Overview of Medium Access Control and Radio Duty Cycling Protocols for Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as smart grids, smart agriculture, smart cities, and e-healthcare are popular nowadays. Generally, IoT end devices are extremely sensitive to the utilization of energy. The medium access control (MAC) layer is responsible for coordination and access of the IoT devices. It is essential to design an efficient MAC protocol for achieving high throughput in IoT. Duty cycling is a fundamental process in wireless networks and also an energy-saving necessity if nodes are required to operate for more than a few days. Numerous MAC protocols along with different objectives have been proposed for the IoT. However, to the best of our knowledge, only limited work has been performed dedicated to covering MAC and radio duty cycling (RDC). Therefore, in this study, we propose a systematic cataloging system and use if to organize the most important MAC and RDC proposals. In this catalog, each protocol has been categorized into main ideas, advantages, applications, limitations, innovative features, and potential future improvements. Our critical analysis is different from previous research studies, as we have fully covered all recent studies in this domain. We discuss challenges and future research directions.

An Adaptive and Spectrally Efficient Multi-Channel Medium Access Control Protocol for Dynamic Ad Hoc Networks.

Medium access control (MAC) protocols in ad hoc networks have evolved from single-channel independent transmission mechanisms to multi-channel concurrent mechanisms to efficiently manage the demands placed on modern networks. The primary aim of this study is to compare the performance of popular multi-channel MAC (MMAC) protocols under saturated network traffic conditions and propose improvements to the protocols under these conditions. A novel, dynamically adaptive MMAC protocol was devised to take advantage of the performance capabilities of the evaluated protocols in changing wireless ad hoc network conditions. A simulation of the familiar MAC protocols was developed based on a validated simulation of the IEEE 802.11 standard. Further, the behaviors and performances of these protocols are compared against the proposed MMAC protocols with a varying number of ad hoc stations and concurrent wireless channels in terms of throughput, Jain's fairness index, and channel access delay. The results show that the proposed MMAC protocol, labeled E-SA-MMAC, outperforms the existing protocols in throughput by up to 11.9% under a constrained number of channels and in channel access delays by up to 18.3%. It can be asserted from these observations that the proposed approach provides performance benefits against its peers under saturated traffic conditions and other factors, such as the number of available wireless channels, and is suitable for dynamic ad hoc network deployments.

Framed Fidelity MAC: Losslessly packing multi-user transmissions in a virtual point-to-point framework

As the number of subscribers in wireless communication systems grows rapidly, it has become important to design efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols to realize resources sharing among multiple users. When designing a MAC, effective management of co-channel interference (CCI) among multiple concurrent transmissions is critical to enhancing system’s spectral efficiency (SE). Although MACs based on existing signal processing can suppress/mitigate CCI among multiple concurrent transmissions, they either consume communication resources or attenuate the desired signals’ transmission, hence incurring loss of transmission performance. To remedy this deficiency, we propose a Framed Fidelity MAC (F2MAC) to losslessly pack multi-user data transmissions into a virtual point-to-point (p2p) framework. Under F2MAC, the common receiver (Rx) selects a virtual framed-channel (a.k.a. framework) and broadcasts it to all mobile terminals. The latter calculate their precoding vectors based on the received virtual framework and their respective communication channels with respect to (w.r.t.) the Rx. Then, the pre-processed signals of multiple users are sent to the Rx via different eigenmodes of the framed-channel. By applying a receive filter to the received mixed signal, Rx can recover users’ desired data without interference. Since F2MAC can decouple the channel quality information (CQI) from channel direction information (CDI) related to the user’s signal transmission, — i.e., CQI is exclusively determined by the user’s communication channel while CDI depends on the unified framework, it can avoid the transmission performance loss incurred by existing signal processing based MAC which adjusts both CQI and CDI simultaneously. Moreover, we propose a Flexible Framed Fidelity MAC (F3MAC) to further improve the system’s SE. By dynamically re-constructing the virtual framed-channel at each mobile user, the user’s transmission can be realized with the principal eigenmode’s gain of his/her communication channel. Our in-depth analysis and simulation results have shown the proposed MAC methods to significantly improve the SE of multi-user communication systems.

EEM-MAC: Enhanced energy efficient mobility aware MAC protocol for mobile internet of things

Mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs) have become a foremost solution in many emerging applications both in industry and academia. Moreover, considering the mobile node in WSN is a challenging task to designing efficient communication protocols, specifically at a medium access control (MAC) layer. Most of the existing protocols consider only for static and slow mobility. To meet with future MIoT applications, in this paper we propose Enhanced Energy Efficient Mobility aware MAC (EEM-MAC) protocol. Our EEM-MAC protocol consists of 3 contributions i) static synchronization and mobility handling phase to support both environments, ii) By using queue length-based channel access priority for static nodes, and iii) the combined highest signal strength and node status-based channel access priority for mobile nodes without any control packet overhead. The simulation results verify that EEM-MAC yields a notable improvement in the average power consumption, packet latency, and packet delivery ratio performances against the well-known mobility-aware MAC protocols under different mobility models and environments.

Energy efficient medium access control protocol for data collection in wireless sensor network: A Q-learning approach

In emerging business markets, the data is becoming new gold for the industries. There are several places such as marketing, manufacturing, and analysis of future trends becoming data-intensive to achieve growth. The tiny sensor placements in the field, cities, industry, buildings and sea are helping to collect data and process it either for information retrieval or decision making. The periodic scheduling of radio transceivers assists in accomplishing efficient energy utilization in sensors often uses Time-division multiple access (TDMA) protocols for node scheduling. Our objective is to reduce the amount of time; the receiver node is in the wake-up state. Besides, the slot which potentially not being used for an extended period can utilize by other nodes. The efficient utilization of slots can help to achieve low power duty cycles with low latency. To accomplish that, we propose the emulation of the classroom learning environment with the Q-learning grading for node scheduling. We proposed an analytical mapping of WSNs to classroom learning. The initial benchmark of the performance has compared to the IEEE.802.11 (TDMA-scheduling). Further, the TDMA driven protocols such as Z-MAC, learning-driven protocols (E-MAC or aloha-Q), i-Queue are compared to evaluate the parameters such as energy consumption, throughput, and latency.

IoT‐TDMA: A performance evaluation of TDMA scheme for wireless sensor networks with Internet of Things

AbstractThis article focuses on the design and implementation of an improved version of TDMA scheme for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) exploiting the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomena. The main motivation behind this work is to create an environment for WSNs to benefit from IoT opportunities. An extensive review of the state‐of‐the‐art medium access control (MAC) approaches proposed for IoT is carried out underlying their basic principles and features. An adaptation of TDMA strategy, called IoT‐TDMA, is proposed to enhance the channel performances particularly throughput and latency. To test the performance of IoT‐TDMA practically, a low‐cost node hardware with the capability of Internet connection is essentially designed. IoT‐TDMA has been implemented on real‐world highly scalable single‐hop and multi‐hop topologies. Performance results indicate significant improvements in terms of channel throughput and end‐to‐end delay in comparison to a recently proposed efficient MAC scheme.

Power Saving MAC Protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs)

Two important criteria of wireless body area networks (WBANs) are low power consumption and delay. These criteria can be met by designing efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols. In this paper, two TDMA-based MAC protocols are proposed. The first protocol, TM–MAC makes use of only a main radio. The second proposed protocol, TWM–MAC makes use of a WUR alongside the main radio. The two proposed protocols are compared with different categories of standard MAC protocols and it is shown that they outperform the standard ones by improving the power consumption and delay. The TWM–MAC consumes 55% less power consumption than the Scheduled Channel Polling MAC (SCP–MAC) protocol for a high traffic scenario on the high-rate platform while the TM-MAC consumes 85% less power consumption than the SCP–MAC. For a low traffic scenario, the TWM–MAC performs 53.5% better than the SCP–MAC protocol and 77.5% better than the very low power MAC (VLPM) protocol on the high and low-rate platforms respectively. An improvement in delay was observed with the TWM–MAC protocol for high traffic situations. The TWM–MAC protocol surpasses the VLPM protocol by 81.1% in terms of latency for a high traffic scenario and 3.2% for a low traffic scenario.