Medium Access Control Layer Design Research Articles

A State-Interactive MAC Layer TDMA Protocol Based on Smart Antennas

Mobile ad hoc networks are self-organizing networks that do not rely on fixed infrastructure. Smart antennas employ advanced beamforming technology, enabling ultra-long-range directional transmission in wireless networks, which leads to lower power consumption and better utilization of spatial resources. The media access control (MAC) protocol design using smart antennas can lead to efficient usage of channel resources. However, during ultra-long-distance transmissions, there may be significant transport delays. In addition, when using the time division multiple access (TDMA) schemes, it can be difficult to manage conflicts arising from adjacent time slot advancement caused by latency compensation in ultra-long-range propagation. Directional transmission and reception can also cause interference between links that reuse the same time slot. This paper proposes a new distributed dynamic TDMA protocol called State Interaction-based Slot Allocation Protocol (SISAP) to address these issues. This protocol is based on slot states and includes TDMA frame structure, slot allocation process, interference self-avoidance strategy, and slot allocation algorithms. According to the simulation results, the MAC layer design scheme suggested in this paper can achieve ultra-long-distance transmission without conflicts. Additionally, it can reduce the interference between links while space multiplexing. Furthermore, the system exhibits remarkable performance in various network aspects, such as throughput and link delay.

SURVEY ON MAC PROTOCOLS FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Wireless sensor networks are alluring for analysts because of the broad scale of applications in different disciplines. Nevertheless, low sensing ranges aggregates to impenetrable networks, as a consequence it has become mandatory to attain a reliable medium access protocol. A variety of medium-access control (MAC) protocols with various intentions have been suggested for wireless sensor networks. In this survey, we will provide an overview of the sensor network characteristics that are important for the structure of MAC layer protocols. Later, we will delineate different MAC protocols suggested for sensor networks, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. Eventually, we will explain open research challenges concerning MAC layer design.

Towards Microscale NFC-Enabled IoT Sensors: Physical and MAC Layer Design Analysis

Microscale sensors provide critical solutions in diverse fields, ranging from measurement, automation, and control in industrial, agricultural, and biomedical applications. However, their development is limited by many requirements and challenges, such as efficient powering and the selection of suitable wireless communication technologies. A number of wireless communication technologies have been deployed in these sensors, including terahertz (Thz) radio frequency and ultrasound. Designing sensors in micro-scale imposes challenges for any communication technique deployed. This paper investigates the use of magnetic induction-based backscatter communication in a microscale sensor. The aim here is to provide both physical and media access control (MAC) layer design analysis for a microscale mote that is powered inductively and communicates with a reader using backscattering. Magnetic induction-based communication and powering are demonstrated via analysis and simulation for the mote. Then, low-power modulation, error-correction coding, and suitable low-power MAC schemes with evidence of feasible implementation in microscale are explored. Results of the performance analysis indicate that the proposed design achieves communication at a range of at least a few centimeters (5–6 cm) with an acceptable bit error rate (BER). Finally, MAC layer analysis reveals the optimum number of motes to be deployed for various read delays and transmission rates.

Contention Intensity Based Distributed Coordination for V2V Safety Message Broadcast

In this paper, we propose a contention intensity based distributed coordination (CIDC) scheme for safety message broadcast. By exploiting the high-frequency and periodical features of the safety message broadcast, the application-layer design of the CIDC enables each vehicle to estimate the instantaneous channel contention intensity in a fully distributed manner. With the contention intensity information, the media access control layer design of CIDC allows vehicles to adopt a better channel access strategy compared to the 802.11p. This is because CIDC selects the initial back-off counter for each new packet deterministically, i.e., based on the contention intensity, rather than randomly. The proposed CIDC is modeled, and key performance indicators in terms of the packet collision probability and average contention delay, are derived. It is shown that the proposed change in the initial counter selection leads to a system model completely different from the classic Markov chain based model. Moreover, the proposed CIDC, fully distributed and compatible with the 802.11p, can achieve both a much lower collision probability and a smaller contention delay compared with 802.11p at the cost of a small communication and computation overhead. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the CIDC in both of the accurate and the erroneous contention intensity estimation scenarios.

Performance analysis of hybrid MAC scheme with multi‐slot reservation

The multi-slot reservation-based hybrid medium access control (MAC) protocol with collision prevention is analysed under a high-density deployment scenario. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the accuracy of the proposed model (i.e. within 4% maximum relative error), which plays a theoretical guiding role in the MAC layer design and optimisation of a heterogeneous network system.

MAC Layer Design for Network-Enabled Visible Light Communication Systems Compliant with IEEE 802.15.7

The design and implementation of medium access control (MAC) layer for network-enabled visible light communication (VLC) system is presented in this paper. The point-to-point link was chosen because of its simple in configuration as well as implementation. Whereas the FPGA Zybo Zynq-7000 is employed for prototyping the hardware of VLC system because of it serve a Linux operating system (OS), i.e. Xillinux. Our MAC layer has been realized in Python programming and running above the Zynq-7000 processor. The designed MAC Layer is adapted from IEEE 802.15.7 standard, specifically for delivering and receiving the MAC frames from the coordinator to the device or vice versa, wrapping the IP packets and unwrapping the MAC Frames with MAC headers and trailers, and performing the error detection in which the cyclic redundant check 16 (CRC-16) was selected. According to the functionality test, our proposed VLC system can perform to send the multimedia contents (video and image) as well as data packet for internet accessing purpose like a wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) connectivity. Thus, it can be concluded that the implemented MAC layer has met the functionality specifications referred to the IEEE 802.15.7 standard. We also provide the Pseudo-code of designed MAC layer and its Python script (source-code) implementation that can be found in the Appendix section.

Ultralow Power Energy Harvesting Body Area Network Design: A Case Study

This paper presents an energy harvesting wireless sensor network (EHWSN) architecture designed for use within an astronaut's space suit. The contribution of this work spans both physical (PHY) layer energy harvesting transceiver design and low power medium access control (MAC) solutions. The architecture consists of a star topology with two types of transceiver nodes: a powered gateway radio (GR) node and multiple energy harvesting biosensor radio (BSR) nodes. To demonstrate the feasibility of an EHWSN at the PHY layer, a representative BSR node is implemented. The BSR node is powered by a thermal energy harvesting system (TEHS) which exploits the difference between the temperatures of a space suit's cooling garment and the astronaut's body. It is shown that, through appropriate control of the duty cycle in transmission and receiving modes, it is possible to operate with less than 1 mW generated by the TEHS. This requires ultralow duty cycle which complicates MAC layer design because a BSR node must sleep for more than 99.6% of overall operation time. The challenge for MAC layer design is the inability to predict when the BSR node awakens from sleep mode due to unpredictability of the harvested energy. Therefore, a new feasible MAC layer design, GRI- (gateway radio initialized-) MAC, is proposed and analyzed.

The Transitional Behavior of Interference in Millimeter Wave Networks and Its Impact on Medium Access Control

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems use a large number of antenna elements that can potentially overcome severe channel attenuation by narrow beamforming. Narrow-beam operation in mmWave networks also reduces multiuser interference, introducing the concept of noise-limited wireless networks as opposed to interference-limited ones. The noise-limited or interference-limited regime heavily reflects on the medium access control (MAC) layer throughput and on proper resource allocation and interference management strategies. Yet, these regimes are ignored in current approaches to mmWave MAC layer design, with the potential disastrous consequences on the communication performance. In this paper, we investigate these regimes in terms of collision probability and throughput. We derive tractable closed-form expressions for the collision probability and MAC layer throughput of mmWave ad hoc networks, operating under slotted ALOHA. The new analysis reveals that mmWave networks may exhibit a non-negligible transitional behavior from a noise-limited regime to an interference-limited one, depending on the density of the transmitters, density and size of obstacles, transmission probability, operating beamwidth, and transmission power. Such transitional behavior necessitates a new framework of adaptive hybrid resource allocation procedure, containing both contention-based and contention-free phases with on-demand realization of the contention-free phase. Moreover, the conventional collision avoidance procedure in the contention-based phase should be revisited, due to the transitional behavior of interference, to maximize throughput/delay performance of mmWave networks. We conclude that, unless proper hybrid schemes are investigated, the severity of the transitional behavior may significantly reduce throughput/delay performance of mmWave networks.

Energy Efficient MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network: A Survey

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an attractive choice for a variety of applications as no wired infrastructure is needed. Other wireless networks are not as energy constrained as WSNs, because they may be plugged into the mains supply or equipped with batteries that are rechargeable and replaceable. Among others, one of the main sources of energy depletion in WSN is communications controlled by the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols. An extensive survey of energy efficient MAC protocols is presented in this article. We categorise WSN MAC protocols in the following categories: controlled access (CA), random access (RA), slotted protocols (SP) and hybrid protocols (HP). We further discuss how energy efficient MAC protocols have developed from fixed sleep/wake cycles through adaptive to dynamic cycles, thus becoming more responsive to traffic load variations. Finally we present open research questions on MAC layer design for WSNs in terms of energy efficiency

Power Optimistic With Throughput Improved Adaptive CSMA MAC Protocol Design for Wireless Ad Hoc Network

Power conservation and throughput management is a major issue in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. In the design of wireless ad hoc networks, various techniques are applied to efficiently allocate the scarce resources available for the communication links and the power control and throughput management is not related to any particular layer in the layered design communication protocol design. But most of the power control and throughput management mechanisms are working in MAC layer. An adaptive CSMA medium access control (MAC) protocol is proposed to consider a spatial network model in which nodes are randomly distributed in space, and address the problem of interference, power control, and throughput improvement through CSMA MAC layer design. Power control and throughput improvement is a critical issue to implement Mobile Ad Hoc networks. The proposed method present a novel power control protocol, and improve the aggregate throughput of the network for its possible application in Mobile Ad Hoc networks. Keyword - Ad hoc networks, Poisson point process, MAC protocols, outage probability.

Proposed Hybrid MAC Layer Design for Priority Application Usage in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

The design of Medium Access Control (MAC) layer in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is very important because it gives significant impact in network performance especially in term of energy consuming. Contention Access method which is Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) will encounter collision problem when more than one node want to access the network simultaneously. Meanwhile, the issue in slotted access which is Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) is channel utilization when the usage of the slot is neglected and wasted in transmission network. In this paper, we propose a hybrid MAC that combines both strengths of CSMA and TDMA in one protocol while avoiding their weaknesses to improve the network performance. The simple and efficient transmission in CSMA method will be used in neighbor discovery (ND) and slot allocation (SA) process. For data transmission, non collision transmission method which is TDMA will be used and it will be changed to CSMA depending on the contention level of the channel. This proposed protocol is suitable for priority application usage where the important information will arrived at the destination in acceptable delay time.

Performance Evaluation of Synchronous Energy Efficient MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol designs for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have already generated interests among researches due to ever increasing range of applications of WSNs. Nodes in a WSN typically operate unattended with a limited power source, energy efficient operations of the sensor nodes especially at the MAC level is very important because majority of energy expenditure take place at the radio level. MAC protocols in WSNs for diverse applications with different objectives have been proposed by researchers. In this paper, we investigate three energy-efficient synchronous MAC protocols for WSNs emphasizing their strength and weakness. Our analysis as well as simulation studies reveal the suitability of these protocols in deployed sensor fields. As a result of our investigation, we found out some open research issues in energy-efficient MAC layer design which we highlighted toward the end of this paper.

An energy-efficient, distributed wireless multicast protocol based on concurrent CTS and N 2 connectivity

Media acquisition process in wireless multicast requires that the sender obtains confirmation replies from a set of receivers. If replies are uncoordinated, the process can be much more time consuming than that of wireless unicast due to packet collisions. We propose a wireless multicast scheme that utilizes a novel concurrent Clear-To-Send (CTS) transmission method and a distributed multicast tree construction method. The concurrent CTS based MAC (Media Access Control) layer design can significantly reduce packet collisions and signaling overhead at the local cell level. Built on top of this new MAC layer protocol, we further propose a distributed multicast tree construction algorithm which grows the tree by maximizing the local multicast gain. The uniqueness of our algorithm is that the tree is constructed implicitly during the media access stage and the algorithm requires little additional message overhead. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. Our results indicate that the proposed scheme offers considerable improvement in multicast turnaround time and efficiency. The proposed scheme is also robust against network topology changes caused by node movements.

Scheduling and power control for MAC layer design in multihop IR‐UWB networks

AbstractRecently, a number of researchers have proposed media access control (MAC) designs for ultra‐wideband (UWB) networks. Among them, designs based on scheduling and power control seem to be of great promise, particularly for quality‐of‐service (QoS) traffic. We investigate the efficiencies of many different choices for scheduling and power allocation for QoS traffic in a multihop impulse radio (IR)‐UWB network, with the objective of achieving both high spectral efficiency and low transmission power. Specifically, we compare different scheduling schemes employing a protocol interference‐based contention graph as well as a physical interference‐based contention graph. We propose a relative distance to determine adjacency in the protocol interference‐based contention graph. Using our improved protocol interference model with graph‐based scheduling, we obtained better performance than the physical interference‐based approach employing link‐by‐link scheduling. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Overview of MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

在无线传感器网络体系结构中,MAC(medium access control)协议是保证网络高效通信的重要协议.无线传感器网络有着与传统无线网络明显不同的性能特点和技术要求,传统无线网络MAC协议无法应用于传感器网络,各种针对特定传感器网络特点的MAC协议相继提出.归纳无线传感器网络MAC协议的设计原则和分类方法,分析当前典型的各类MAC协议的主要机制,详细比较这些协议的特点、性能差异和应用范围.最后总结无线传感器网络MAC协议的研究现状,指出未来的研究重点.

A Unified MAC Layer Framework for Ad-Hoc Networks With Smart Antennas

Smart antennas represent a broad variety of antennas that differ in their performance and transceiver complexity. The superior capabilities of smart antennas, however, can be leveraged only through appropriately designed higher layer network protocols, including at the medium access control (MAC) layer. Although several related works have considered such tailored protocols, they do so in the context of specific antenna technologies. In this paper, we explore the possibility for a unified approach to medium access control in ad hoc networks with smart antennas. We first present a unified representation of the PHY layer capabilities of the different types of smart antennas, and their relevance to MAC layer design. We then define a unified MAC problem formulation, and derive unified MAC algorithms (both centralized and distributed) from the formulation. Finally, using the algorithms developed, we investigate the relative performance trade-offs of the different technologies under varying network conditions. We also analyze theoretically the performance bounds of the different smart antenna technologies when the available gains are exploited for rate increase and communication range increase.

Cross-layer adaptive resource allocation for OFDM systems with hybrid smart antennas

Orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) has become one of the most popular air-link technologies for future broadband wireless communications. To further improve its bandwidth efficiency and system performance, adaptive resource allocation and smart antenna techniques have been widely used in the OFDM system. However, the use of fully adaptive beamforming in an OFDM system significantly increases the complexity of the medium access control layer design and thus affects the implementation of adaptive resource allocation. A novel cross-layer adaptive resource allocation strategy with hybrid adaptive array and switched-beam smart antennas suitable for the OFDM systems has been proposed. With the help of different smart antennas schemes based on different users' quality of service requirements, the strategy effectively reduces the complexity of adaptive resource allocation in an OFDM system, while still maintaining a satisfactory system performance.

MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks: a survey

Wireless sensor networks are appealing to researchers due to their wide range of application potential in areas such as target detection and tracking, environmental monitoring, industrial process monitoring, and tactical systems. However, low sensing ranges result in dense networks and thus it becomes necessary to achieve an efficient medium-access protocol subject to power constraints. Various medium-access control (MAC) protocols with different objectives have been proposed for wireless sensor networks. In this article, we first outline the sensor network properties that are crucial for the design of MAC layer protocols. Then, we describe several MAC protocols proposed for sensor networks, emphasizing their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we point out open research issues with regard to MAC layer design.