Energy Efficient Medium Access Control Research Articles

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.

An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Three-Dimensional Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks With Time Synchronization and Power Control

In recent years, Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) have gained considerable attention for their unique role in detecting and monitoring the underwater environment. However, due to the long propagation time, high bit error rate, and limited bandwidth of underwater acoustic systems, the design of media access control (MAC) protocols is extremely complex, especially for the power consumption of UASNs. Therefore, this paper proposes an energy-efficient MAC protocol for three-dimensional UASNs with time synchronization and power control (TDTSPC-MAC). The proposed protocol is a hybrid access scheme for three-dimensional UASN using techniques such as time synchronization, power control, clustering, layering, and sleep mechanisms. Moreover, the TDTSPC-MAC protocol uses the hierarchical concept and distributed clustering algorithm to divide the three-dimensional space, and combines time synchronization and power control strategies to avoid collisions. Besides, energy consumption is reduced through monitoring and sleep mode. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed TDTSPC-MAC protocol has reasonable data transmission delay time, throughput, energy consumption, and other performance.

A roadmap to developing energy-efficient MAC protocol in wireless sensor networks: a case of ADP-MAC development and implementation

Over the past two decades, hundreds of protocols have been developed for diversified applications of WSN corresponding to different layers in the communication stack. Among these, Media Access Control (MAC) layer protocols are of great interest due to providing possibility of optimizing performance parameters. Despite availability of a large number of survey articles, there remains a gap for a tutorial that offers guidelines about the development process of MAC protocol. In this paper, we present a detailed tutorial for developing a MAC protocol starting from the stage of research gap identification and ending at the performance evaluation. We described the journey of development and implementation of a novel asynchronous MAC protocol ADP-MAC (Adaptive and Dynamic Polling MAC) as a case study. ADP-MAC was developed by deploying a novel concept of channel polling interval distributions, and was compared against Synchronized Channel Polling- MAC (SCP-MAC) and lightweight Traffic Auto-Adaptation based MAC (T-AAD). Finally, we proposed major milestones of protocol development along with recommendations about publishing the research.

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.

An RTS–CTS based medium access control protocol for full-duplex wireless local area networks

In-band full-duplex (IB-FD) wireless is a promising next generation communication technology which can double the spectral efficiency with respect to the conventional in-band half-duplex (IB-HD) radio. Hidden stations degrade the performances of any practical wireless networks, but unlike IB-HD networks, hidden station scenarios are different in IB-FD wireless networks. In this paper, we have presented a novel energy-efficient medium access control protocol exploiting the network allocation vector, whereby mitigating the hidden station problem in an IB-FD wireless network. Moreover, an analytical model has been devised to unveil the impact of the distance between a primary–secondary transceiver pair in order to select a secondary receiver to initiate a successful relay like IB-FD link, thereby diminishing the inter-station interference problem. In addition, we have shown that the number of IB-FD transmission link increases if the secondary transmitter uses adaptive transmission power. We have evaluated the performance of the proposed protocol through detailed simulations using a modified version of NS-3 in which the wireless module has been re-designed to accommodate the concept of IB-FD radio. Results show that our proposed protocol achieves at least 61% and 41% throughput gain and consumes 58% and 60% lower energy than IEEE 802.11 DCF RTS–CTS and FD-MAC protocols, respectively. Our proposed protocol outperforms the baseline protocols with respect to throughput, energy consumption, average re-transmission rate, average packet drop rate, etc. The proposed scheme can be very useful to IB-FD wireless networks which contain bandwidth-hungry applications.

Priority and Traffic-Aware Contention-Based Medium Access Control Scheme for Multievent Wireless Sensor Networks

The requirement of high quality of service (QoS) in multi-priority industrial and domestic sensor networks poses new challenges to the increasing adoption of Internet of Things (IoT). In Multi-event Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs), nodes generate different types of data packets i.e., urgent (high priority) or normal (low priority), with different traffic proportions. High priority packets require an assurance of faster transmission and higher reliability in the network. In the literature, the existing medium access control (MAC) protocols for MWSNs have limited consideration in supporting data priority with different traffic proportions. Therefore, this paper proposes an energy efficient MAC scheme that incorporates multi-priority of data packets with dynamic traffic proportion, called PriTraCon-MAC. PriTraCon-MAC supports multi-events by considering four different priority levels of data packets and uses a novel approach that adjusts the contention window adaptively. Due to that, Request-To-Send frame of higher priority data can be sent earlier in the contention window, resulting in the corresponding faster acceptance by the receiver. Furthermore, mathematical delay analysis with different priority traffic proportions has also been undertaken. In addition, PriTraCon-MAC has been implemented in OMNET++ Castalia and its performance has been evaluated in terms of packet delay, reliability, and energy consumption, and compared with the existing Timeout Multi-priority based-MAC (TMPQ-MAC) under various network conditions. The simulation results demonstrate that PriTraCon-MAC offers lower average delay and achieves significantly higher packet success rate, while reducing energy consumption by up to 80% when compared with TMPQ-MAC protocol.

Adaptive dynamic duty cycle mechanism for energy efficient medium access control in wireless multimedia sensor networks

AbstractMultimedia applications require significantly higher bandwidth than conventional textual applications. Furthermore, multimedia stream requires time sensitive and involves high‐energy consumption, which become more challenging on resource constrained networks such as wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN). As a result, developing an energy efficient algorithm to prolong the network lifetime is the main reoccurring issue in WMSN. Although the duty cycling mechanism has been proven to be an efficient solution for energy saving in various WSN applications, the tradeoff between energy efficiency and quality of service (QoS) on WMSN remains striking. In this article, an adaptive dynamic duty cycle mechanism for energy‐efficient medium access control (ADE‐MAC) is proposed for WMSNs. ADE‐MAC uses a unique asynchronous duty cycle approach to schedule the sleep pattern of each sensor node which can be adapted according to the incoming traffic rate and queuing delay at each node. In the proposed system, the overhead of synchronization is avoided because every node has its own scheduling sleep, and the only sender node must wake up the receiver nodes by using preambles packets. The findings that result from comprehensive simulation show that ADE‐MAC outperforms the baseline approaches in term of delivery ratio by 12%, less packet overhead by 28%, less end‐to‐end delay by 19%, and less power consumption by 41% compared to the baseline mechanisms.

Energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless LANs with WiFi sensors

Abstract More and more mobile computing devices such as smartphones with limited battery power are being used in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs, and WiFi sensors with very limited battery power are expected to get Internet access through wireless LANs in the near future. We propose an efficient MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol so that WiFi sensors and mobile devices are connected to APs (Access Points) in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs in an energy-efficient manner.

Energy Efficient Cross Layer MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks in Remote Area Monitoring Applications

Sensor nodes are typically less mobile, much limited in capabilities, and more densely deployed than the traditional wired networks as well as mobile ad-hoc networks. General Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are designed with electro-mechanical sensors through wireless data communication. Nowadays the WSN has become ubiquitous. WSN is used in combination with Internet of Things and in many Big Data applications, it is used in the lower layer for data collection. It is deployed in combination with several high end networks. All the higher layer networks and application layer services depend on the low level WSN in the deployment site. So to achieve energy efficiency in the overall network some simplification strategies have to be carried out not only in the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer but also in the network and transport layers. An energy efficient algorithm for scheduling and clustering is proposed and described in detail. The proposed methodology clusters the nodes using a traditional yet simplified approach of hierarchically sorting the sensor nodes. Few important works on cross layer protocols for WSNs are reviewed and an attempt to modify their pattern has also been presented in this paper with results. Comparison with few prominent protocols in this domain has also been made. As a result of the comparison one would get a basic idea of using which type of scheduling algorithm for which type of monitoring applications.

Energy-Efficient MAC for Cellular IoT: State-of-the-Art, Challenges, and Standardization

In the modern world, the connectivity-as-we-go model is gaining popularity. Internet-of-Things (IoT) envisions a future in which human beings communicate with each other and with devices that have identities and virtual personalities, as well as sensing, processing, and networking capabilities, which will allow the developing of smart environments that operate with little or no human intervention. In such IoT environments, that will have battery-operated sensors and devices, energy efficiency becomes a fundamental concern. Thus, energy-efficient (EE) connectivity is gaining significant attention from the industrial and academic communities. This work aims to provide a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey on the energy efficiency of medium access control (MAC) protocols for cellular IoT. we provide a detailed discussion on the sources of energy dissipation at the MAC layer and then propose solutions. In addition to reviewing the proposed MAC designs, we also provide insights and suggestions that can guide practitioners and researchers in designing EE MAC protocols that extend the battery life of IoT devices. Finally, we identify a range of challenging open problems that should be solved for providing EE MAC services for IoT devices, along with corresponding opportunities and future research ideas to address these challenges.

A Study on the Wireless Body Area Network MAC Protocol Using Dynamic Superframe for e-Health IoT

One of the most remarkable applications of the Internet of Things is health monitoring. Wireless body area networks (WBANs) consist of several body sensors implanted in or place on a human body and a coordinator. One of the essential issues of WBANs is the design of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to improve system efficiency. In this paper, we modify the IEEE 802.15.4 standard MAC superframe structure and propose an energy-efficient MAC protocol for WBANs in the e-Health Internet of Things (IoT) systems. In this scheme, the time slots are divided into mini-slots. The lengths of the contention access period and the contention free period are both variable. By using this mechanism, the utility of time slots can be considerably increased.

PrEEMAC: Priority based energy efficient MAC protocol for Wireless Body Sensor Networks

Wearable wireless sensors, or Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN), is one of the most recent fields of research in healthcare applications. The sensors are placed on the human body to detect the critical medical parameters and transmit the collected data to a centralized node. Though the devices work at low energy and power constraints, maintenance of such devices is a crucial aspect. In light of this requirement, an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol should be utilized to extend the life time of the network. In this paper, we propose a new “Priority based Energy Efficient (PrEE) MAC protocol” incorporated with various priorities in predefined devices based on data sensing and normal devices changing to priority when the value is more than the threshold, by modifying IEEE 802.15.4 header bits. The PrEE MAC protocol is designed based on the IEEE 802.15.4 and its Superframe structure. The simulation results show that the energy efficiency and lifetime of the proposed MAC protocol is more as compared to the existing MAC protocol.

An energy efficient hybrid MAC protocol for smart home networks

In this paper cluster-based hybrid MAC (CB-HMAC) protocol, based on IEEE 802.15.4 MAC is proposed for smart home networks. The CB-HMAC is specially designed for short packet transmission in a dense home network environment. Simulation results show that the proposed CB-HMAC is more energy-efficient than other medium access control (MAC) protocols without sacrificing much delay and throughput.

ECM-MAC: An Efficient Collision Mitigation Strategy in Contention Based MAC Protocol

Medium Access Control (MAC) is the sub-layer of data link layer in the communication OSI model, whose basic function is to control the hardware that interacts with the transmission medium. In Wireless sensor network, the communication is done without any wired connectivity and the sensor nodes get energy through batteries. MAC layer protocol is classified as contention based and contention free. Over the years, these protocols have served efficiently in controlling the data transmission, yet they have some compromising and challenging issues, and data collision is one of them. Contention based protocols are reported to be more vulnerable to collisions, as they allow sharing of channels among transmitting nodes. Collisions result in message delay, data loss and retransmissions, resultantly demanding more energy. Researchers are trying their best to reduce the collisions during transmission. This research is aimed to evaluate the priority-based collision control in contention-based protocol. We present a new technique Energy efficient Collison mitigation MAC (ECM-MAC) protocol to handle the QoS and energy constraints for variety of applications. ECM-MAC uses different contention window and node priority mechanism to get the overall performance of the network. Nodes with most important data or with least residual energy will be allowed to transmit first, thereby minimizing the chances of collisions and maximizing the lifespan of the network. In case of high level of collision, the data traffic will be intelligently reduced to minimize the collisions. A contention-based MAC protocol is evaluated to compare the impacts of suggested mechanism with the standard protocol. It will be useful for designers to develop a better collision avoiding contention-based protocol. In wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), a sensor node is typically comprising detection unit, transceiver unit (to send and receive the data packets), processing unit and an energy supply unit for energy provisioning. Enhancement in network lifetime is an important and major challenge in WSNs. Since the transceiver unit has more impact on the energy consumption of the node and its reduction results in significant improvement on network lifetime. In our work, we propose an efficient mechanism that prioritized the nodes to get the high performance in quality of service. MAC protocol is targeted to achieve this, as MAC layer has the authority access to the transmission channel. We prioritize the nodes with lower energy to increase the chances of that node to get access of the transmission channel before their power and battery ran out. Our proposed strategy outperforms other protocols in terms of content retrieval Time, retransmissions and energy efficiency.

Channel Resource Scheduling for Stringent Demand of Emergency Data Transmission in WBANs

Media access control (MAC) plays a pivotal role in ensuring proper operation in wireless body area networks (WBANs). However, current solutions still cannot satisfy the stringent requirements of low power and low delay for emergency data reporting. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient and emergency-aware MAC (EEEA-MAC) protocol for meeting such a rigorous demand. First, we design a node-different channel access scheme, in which source nodes use the CSMA/CA pattern while relay nodes adopt the hybrid CSMA/CA-TDMA pattern. Second, we devise an emergency-first time-slot allocation scheme, in which channel sensing is performed and the emergency data is handled by relay nodes according to different cases. EEEA-MAC has two striking features. One is that, source nodes adopt the CSMA/CA scheme instead of the conventional CSMA/CA-TDMA scheme, ensuring the requirement because there are almost no collisions and no confirmation messages in this scheme. The other is that, relay nodes use a sensing-based emergency data handling mechanism instead of the traditional empty-slot occupying mechanism, further guaranteeing the requirement owing to the immediate handling of emergency data and the short time of channel sensing. Extensive simulations demonstrate the advantages of EEEA-MAC in terms of energy dissipation and latency.

Medium Access Control Protocols for Flying Ad Hoc Networks: A Review

Recently, flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) have been broadly applied to various civilian and military applications. Medium access control (MAC) protocols have attracted significant attention because of their impact on overall network performance. Owing to peculiar features such as high mobility and dynamic topology, however, the design of a MAC protocol for FANETs confronts challenges. Several MAC protocols for FANETs have been reported in literature. In early MAC protocols for FANETs, delay, throughput, and collision detection were the key design concerns. Recently, however, the design of an energy-efficient MAC protocol has become a new research focus. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there exists no survey on MAC protocols for FANETs. This study extensively investigates the existing MAC protocols for FANETs. In this paper, the MAC design issues in FANETs are presented first. Subsequently, the existing MAC protocols are reviewed and discussed from the perspective of major features, operational principles, advantages, and limitations. The MAC protocols are then qualitatively compared in terms of major features, characteristics, and performance factors. Furthermore, open issues and research challenges are summarized and discussed.

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.

Energy-Efficient Asynchronous QoS MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained significant attention in both industry and academia. In WSNs, each sensor node is normally equipped with a small-size battery with finite capacity. Hence, energy-efficient communication is considered a key factor for the extension of network lifetime. Formerly, a large number of medium access control (MAC) protocols have been proposed to improve energy efficiency to prolong the network lifetime. There are applications that generate different types of data packets and require quality of service (QoS) without any disruption in network operation. Therefore, these applications need an energy-efficient QoS MAC protocol that can support QoS by considering energy efficiency as the primary goal to avoid any failure in the network. This article proposes an energy-efficient asynchronous QoS (AQSen) MAC protocol, called AQSen-MAC. The AQSen-MAC considers different types of data packets and uses two novel techniques: self-adaptation and scheduling to enhance energy efficiency, packet delivery ratio, and network throughput. Furthermore, in the protocol, the receiver adjusts its duty cycle according to the remaining energy to prolong the network operation. Finally, the performance of the AQSen-MAC protocol has been evaluated through detailed simulation using Castalia and compared with MPQ-MAC, PMME-MAC, and QAEE-MAC protocols. The simulation results indicate that the AQSen-MAC protocol significantly reduces the energy consumption at the receiver of up to 13.4%, consumption per bit of up to 3% and improves the packet delivery ratio and network throughput of up to 12% in the network.

I-MAC: In-Body Sensor MAC in Wireless Body Area Networks for Healthcare IoT

The application of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology in modern healthcare environment has given rise to a new paradigm known as healthcare IoT. The wireless body area network (WBAN) is one of the basic building blocks of IoT-based healthcare system, comprising many wearable (on-body) and implant (in-body) sensors placed in or around patient body connected to a hub for physiological signal monitoring. In in-body sensor-based WBAN, guaranteeing quality-of-service and prolonging network lifetime are major impediments due to the sensor location and limited battery capacity. In this article, we propose a novel energy-efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol for IEEE 802.15.6 standard complaint in-body sensor-based WBAN. Typically, the in-body sensor-based WBAN communication is hub-initiated; however, in case of an emergency event, the in-body sensor node transmits an emergency frame arbitrarily without sensing the channel. This inadvertent in-body sensor-initiated transmission has a very high probability of collision with the ongoing hub-initiated transmission, and/or another in-body sensor-initiated emergency frame transmission. This results in emergency frame retransmission and consequently affects the node's energy consumption and lifetime. To alleviate this issue, we propose a modified superframe structure, in which separate access phases are introduced for the emergency event and regular event. In case of an emergency event, a novel emergency event handling scheme and a ranking and priority assignment protocol is proposed to detect and address the critical event of in-body sensors. To minimize the collision, a scheduled access mechanism is proposed according to the criticality of the node. Performance analysis of the proposed in-body sensor MAC is done in terms of latency and overall power consumption, in case of both emergency and regular events.