Low Duty-cycled Wireless Sensor Networks Research Articles

LORA: Load-Balanced Opportunistic Routing for Asynchronous Duty-Cycled WSN

Opportunistic Routing (OR) is adapted to improve the performance of low Duty-cycled Wireless Sensor Networks by exploiting its broadcast nature. In contrast to traditional routing, where packets are transmitted along pre-determined paths, OR uses a prioritization metric to select a set of candidates as potential forwarders. This solves the sender's waiting time problem. However, too many candidates may simultaneously wake-up, generating more duplicate packets, occupying the restricted resources and hinder the packet delivery performance. Consciously, to restrict the number of candidates and to counterbalance between the waiting time problem and the duplicate packets problem, this paper proposed a new protocol that combines two main parts. First, each node defines a Candidates Zone (CZ) by a regular geometric shape of four corners. The packets generated by the node will be routed via any path within the CZ. Expressly, the nodes within the CZ are allowed to be selected as candidates. The size of CZ is controlled by the network density. Second, the candidates within the CZ are prioritized based on the OR metric, which is defined as the multiplication of four-distributions: direction distribution, transmission-distance distribution, perpendicular-distance distribution, and residual energy distribution. Through an extensive performance evaluation study and simulation of large-scale scenarios, the results demonstrated that our protocol achieved better performance compared to the state-of-the-art solutions in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, routing efficiency, sender waiting time, and duplicate packets.

Contention-Detectable Mechanism for Receiver-Initiated MAC

The energy efficiency and delivery robustness are two critical issues for low duty-cycled wireless sensor networks. The asynchronous receiver-initiated duty-cycling media access control (MAC) protocols have shown their effectiveness through various studies. In receiver-initiated MACs, packet transmission is triggered by the probe of receiver. However, it suffers from the performance degradation incurred by packet collision, especially under bursty traffic. Several protocols have been proposed to address this problem, but their performance is restricted by the unnecessary backoff time and long negotiation process. In this article, we present CD-MAC, an energy-efficient and robust contention-detectable mechanism for addressing the collision-catching problem in receiver-initiated MACs. By exploring the temporal diversity of the acknowledgments, a receiver recognizes the potential senders and subsequently polls individual senders one by one. On that basis, CD-MAC can successfully avoid packet collision even though multiple senders have data packets to transmit to the same receiver. We implement CD-MAC in TinyOS and evaluate its performance on an indoor testbed with single-hop and multi-hop network scenarios. The results show that CD-MAC can significantly improve throughput by 1.72 times compared with the state-of-the-art receiver-initiated MAC protocol under bursty traffic loads. The results also demonstrate that CD-MAC can effectively mitigate the influence of hidden terminal problem and adapt to network dynamics well.

Minimizing Delay and Transmission Times with Long Lifetime in Code Dissemination Scheme for High Loss Ratio and Low Duty Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks.

Software defined networks brings greater flexibility to networks and therefore generates new vitality. Thanks to the ability to update soft code to sensor nodes, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) brings profound changes to Internet of Things. However, it is a challenging issue to minimize delay and transmission times and maintain long lifetime when broadcasting data packets in high loss ratio and low duty cycle WSNs. Although there have been some research concerning code dissemination, those schemes can only achieve a tradeoff between different performances, instead of optimizing all these important performances at the same time. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new strategy that can reduce delay and transmission times simultaneously. In traditional method, the broadcasting nature of wireless communication is not sufficiently utilized. By allowing sons of the same parent node to share awake slots, the broadcasting nature is well exploited and delay is thus reduced as well as transmission times with lifetime not affected. And, as we discover there is energy surplus when collecting data in area away from sink, we further improve this strategy so that all the performances can be further bettered. Compared with traditional method, the methods we design (IFAS, BTAS and AAPS) can respectively reduce delay by 20.56%, 31.59%, 55.16% and reduce transmission times by 29.53%, 43.93%, 42.04%, while not reducing lifetime.

Delay-sensitive flooding based on expected path quality in low duty-cycled wireless sensor networks

Flooding in low duty-cycled wireless sensor networks suffers from a large transmission delay because a sender has to wait until a receiver becomes active to forward a packet. With the presence of unreliable radio links, the delay performance is even more severely degraded. In this article, we aim to reduce the flooding delay in low duty-cycled wireless sensor networks in relation to link unreliability. The key idea is to build a delay-sensitive flooding tree in which a node receives packet through the shortest path in terms of the total expected number of transmissions. In addition, the algorithm allows multiple senders to send through links outside of the tree if they can provide earlier expected delivery time. To give priorities to potential senders, we employ an energy-balancing mechanism which dynamically distributes the sending role among them. The mechanism not only makes sure senders start to acquire the channel at different times to prevent collisions but also lets them alternatively take turns based on residual energy, in order to lengthen network lifetime. Compared with the best known schemes, the proposed algorithm achieves up to 8% improvement in terms of flooding delay, energy consumption, and network lifetime.

Multi-Constrained QoS Opportunistic Routing by Optimal Power Tuning in Low Duty-Cycle WSNs

Designing a multi-constrained QoS (Quality of service) communication protocol for mission-critical applications that seeks a path connecting source node and destination node that satisfies multiple QoS constrains such as energy cost, delay, and reliability imposes a great challenge in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In such challenging dynamic environment, traditional routing and layered infrastructure are inefficient and sometimes even infeasible. In recent research works, the opportunistic routing paradigm which delays the forwarding decision until reception of packets in forwarders by utilizing the broadcast nature of the wireless medium has been exploited to overcome the limitations of traditional routing. However, to guarantee the balance between the energy, delay and reliability requires the refinement of opportunistic routing through interaction between underlying layers known as cross-layer opportunistic routing. Indeed, these schemes fail to achieve optimal performance and hence require a new method to facilitate the adoption of the routing protocol to the dynamic challenging environments. In this paper, we propose a universal cross-layered opportunistic based communication protocol for WSNs for guaranteeing the user set constraints on multi-constrained QoS in low-duty-cycle WSN. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed work, Multi-Constrained QoS Opportunistic routing by optimal Power Tuning (MOR-PT) effectively achieves the feasible QoS trade-off constraints set by user by jointly considering the power control and selection diversity over established algorithms like DSF [1] and DTPC [2].

Adaptive Source Time Synchronization for Low-Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks

Time synchronization is critical for most distributed systems, especially for low-dutycycle Wireless Sensor Networks(WSNs). Low-duty-cycle WSNs make use of time synchronization in many contexts(scheduling and sleeping, TDMA, Event Identification, data fusion, etc). A novel adaptive source time synchronization algorithm designed for low-duty-cycle WSNs, namely ASTS, is presented in the paper. The algorithm can be used for a small Low-Duty-Cycle WSN to be synchronized to a common clock, or used for a giant Low-Duty-Cycle WSN to be synchronized distributed. To improve the synchronization accuracy, all nodes estimate their time drifts relative to their neighbors using Maximum Likelihood Estimation, and get be synchronized to a common clock or their heads based on a vector of time drifts carried by the reference packet sent by the reference node. Simulation shows that the algorithm drastically improves the synchronization accuracy and scalability, and is much more applicable for low-duty-cycle WSNs than other synchronization algorithms.

Opportunistic Routing in Low Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks

Opportunistic routing is widely known to have substantially better performance than unicast routing in wireless networks with lossy links. However, wireless sensor networks are usually duty cycled, that is, they frequently enter sleep states to ensure long network lifetime. This renders existing opportunistic routing schemes impractical, as they assume that nodes are always awake and can overhear other transmissions. In this article we introduce ORW, a practical opportunistic routing scheme for wireless sensor networks. ORW uses a novel opportunistic routing metric, EDC, that reflects the expected number of duty-cycled wakeups that are required to successfully deliver a packet from source to destination. We devise distributed algorithms that find the EDC-optimal forwarding and demonstrate using analytical performance models and simulations that EDC-based opportunistic routing results in significantly reduced delay and improved energy efficiency compared to traditional unicast routing. In addition, we evaluate the performance of ORW in both simulations and testbed-based experiments. Our results show that ORW reduces radio duty cycles on average by 50% (up to 90% on individual nodes) and delays by 30% to 90% when compared to the state-of-the-art.

Optimal Stochastic Routing in Low Duty-Cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

We study a routing problem in wireless sensor networks whereby sensors are duty-cycled. When sensors alternate between on and off modes, delays encountered in packet delivery due to loss in connectivity can become a critical problem, and how to achieve delay-optimality is nontrivial. For instance, when sensors’ sleep schedules are uncoordinated, it is not immediately clear whether a sensor with data to transmit should wait for a particular neighbor (who may be on a short route) to become available/active before transmission, or simply transmit to an available/active neighbor to avoid waiting. To obtain some insight into this problem, in this paper we formulate it as an optimal stochastic routing problem, where the randomness in the system comes from random duty-cycling, as well as the uncertainty in packet transmission due to time-varying channel conditions. A similar framework has been used in prior work that results in optimal routing algorithms that are sample-path dependent, also referred to as opport...

On Reliable Broadcast in Low Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks

Broadcast is one of the most fundamental services in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It facilitates sensor nodes to propagate messages across the whole network, serving a wide range of higher level operations and thus being critical to the overall network design. A distinct feature of WSNs is that many nodes alternate between active and dormant states, so as to conserve energy and extend the network lifetime. Unfortunately, the impact of such cycles has been largely ignored in existing broadcast implementations that adopt the common assumption of all nodes being active all over the time. In this paper, we revisit the broadcast problem with active/dormant cycles. We show strong evidence that conventional broadcast approaches will suffer from severe performance degradation, and, under low duty cycles, they could easily fail to cover the whole network in an acceptable time frame. To this end, we remodel the broadcast problem in this new context, seeking a balance between efficiency and latency with coverage guarantees. We demonstrate that this problem can be translated into a graph equivalence, and develop a centralized optimal solution. It provides a valuable benchmark for assessing diverse duty-cycle-aware broadcast strategies. We then extend it to an efficient and scalable distributed implementation, which relies on local information and operations only, with built-in loss compensation mechanisms. The performance of our solution is evaluated under diverse network configurations. The results suggest that our distributed solution is close to the lower bounds of both time and forwarding costs, and it well resists to the wireless loss with good scalability on the network size and density. In addition, it enables flexible control toward the quality of broadcast coverage.