Performance Of Medium Access Control Protocol Research Articles

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.

Sliding Group Window with Rebacking off for Collision Avoidance in High-Efficiency Wireless Networks

It is difficult for wireless local area networks (WLANs), IEEE 802.11ax high-efficiency WLAN (HEW), to join next-generation innovations such as 5th generation (5G) and Internet of Things (IoT) because they still have their conventional channel access mechanism as their essential medium access control (MAC) protocol. The MAC protocol uses a traditional binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm to access channel resources that depend on the noncognitive increment of contention parameters for collision avoidance. In BEB, the collision issue increases with the increase in connected devices in the network due to a fixed contention window size. The larger the size of the network, the larger the collision in the network. To avoid such a circumstance, in this paper, we propose a sliding group window (sGW) mechanism dependent on collision-point assessment in order to improve the performance of MAC protocol for HEW. The proposed algorithm additionally presents a rebacking off for collision avoidance (ReBOCA) system for sGW, which combines the uniform dispersion of the contention parameters. This variation of an ordinary backoff algorithm permits the reasonable sliding of the user groups in the case of collision. The algorithm explicitly accounts for the peculiarities of dense environments and backward compatibility. Key aspects of the proposed solution include collision-point estimation, rebacking off for collision distribution convergence for fair treatment, and adaptive sliding of group windows to mitigate contention unfairness. We further formulated a closed-form Markov chain model for the performance analysis of our proposed sGW with ReBOCA scheme. Theoretical and practical results prove that our proposed scheme achieved maximal efficiency, even under dense environments. An increase in throughput with a lower packet collision probability was achieved with the proposed mechanism, and the efficiency increased as the number of contending stations increased than compared to traditional BEB performance. Our proposed ReBOCA mechanism enhanced network throughput by 38.18% than compared to the conventional BEB mechanism.

Performance of low level protocols in high traffic wireless body sensor networks

The rapid development of medical sensors has increased the interest in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications where physiological data from the human body and its environment is gathered, monitored, and analyzed to take the proper measures. In WBANs, it is essential to design MAC protocols that ensure adequate performance and Quality of Service (QoS). This paper investigates Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols used in WBAN, and compares their performance in a high traffic environment with respect to different QoS and network performance metrics. Such scenario can be induced in case of emergency for example, where physiological data collected from all sensors on human body should be sent simultaneously to take appropriate action. This study can also be extended to cover collaborative WBAN systems where information from different bodies is sent simultaneously leading to high traffic. OPNET simulations are performed to compare the performance of the different MAC protocols under the same experimental conditions. A new MAC scheme aiming to enhance the delay, throughput, and energy performance of the system is then proposed and compared to existing protocols, to evaluate its performance in high traffic environment.

Efficient T-CONT-Agnostic Bandwidth and Wavelength Allocation for NG-PON2

Dynamic bandwidth and wavelength allocation are used to demonstrate high quality of service (QoS) in time wavelength-division multiplexed–passive optical networks (TWDM-PONs). Both bandwidth and wavelength assignment are performed on the basis of transmission containers (T-CONTs) and therefore by means of upstream service priority traffic flows. Our medium access control (MAC) protocol therefore ensures consistency in processing alike classes of service across all optical network units (ONUs) in agreement with their QoS figures. For evaluation of the MAC protocol performance, a simulator has been implemented in OPNET featuring a 40 km, 40 Gbps TWDM-PON with four stacked wavelengths at 10 Gbps each and 256 ONUs. Simulation results have confirmed the efficiency of allocating bandwidth to each wavelength and the significant increase of network traffic flow due to adaptive polling from 9.04 to 9.74 Gbps. The benefit of T-CONT-centric allocation has also been measured with respect to packet delay and queue occupancy, achieving low packet delay across all T-CONTs. Therefore, improved NG-PON2 performance and greater efficiency are obtained in this first demonstration of T-CONTs allocated to both wavelength and time.

Energy Efficient Adaptive Bit-Map-Assisted Medium Access Control Protocol

Present work proposes an Adaptive Bit-Map-Assisted (ABMA) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. ABMA is a modified form of Energy-efficient Bit-Map-Assisted (E-BMA) MAC protocol by which it can efficiently utilize the data slots with low overhead traffic. In ABMA MAC protocol, cluster head adaptively varies allotment of data slots to the sensor node (SN) which is based on the buffer status of the SN. In addition, ABMA uses two bit control field for the reservation of data slots and piggybacking. Simulation and mathematical models have been developed and proposed for ABMA MAC protocol. The performance of ABMA MAC protocol has been compared with Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), Energy Efficient-TDMA (EA-TDMA), Bit-Map-Assisted (BMA) and Energy Efficient-BMA (E-BMA) MAC protocols. Both analytical and simulation results show the overall superiority of our proposed ABMA MAC protocol.

Deep Reinforcement Learning Paradigm for Performance Optimization of Channel Observation–Based MAC Protocols in Dense WLANs

The potential applications of deep learning to the media access control (MAC) layer of wireless local area networks (WLANs) have already been progressively acknowledged due to their novel features for future communications. Their new features challenge conventional communications theories with more sophisticated artificial intelligence-based theories. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is one DL technique that is motivated by the behaviorist sensibility and control philosophy, where a learner can achieve an objective by interacting with the environment. Next-generation dense WLANs like the IEEE 802.11ax high-efficiency WLAN are expected to confront ultra-dense diverse user environments and radically new applications. To satisfy the diverse requirements of such dense WLANs, it is anticipated that prospective WLANs will freely access the best channel resources with the assistance of self-scrutinized wireless channel condition inference. Channel collision handling is one of the major obstacles for future WLANs due to the increase in density of the users. Therefore, in this paper, we propose DRL as an intelligent paradigm for MAC layer resource allocation in dense WLANs. One of the DRL models, Q-learning (QL), is used to optimize the performance of channel observation-based MAC protocols in dense WLANs. An intelligent QL-based resource allocation ( ${i}$ QRA) mechanism is proposed for MAC layer channel access in dense WLANs. The performance of the proposed mechanism is evaluated through extensive simulations. Simulation results indicate that the proposed intelligent paradigm learns diverse WLAN environments and optimizes performance, compared to conventional non-intelligent MAC protocols. The performance of the proposed ${i}$ QRA mechanism is evaluated in diverse WLANs with throughput, channel access delay, and fairness as performance metrics.

Portability, compatibility and reuse of MAC protocols across different IoT radio platforms

To cope with the diversity of Internet of Things (IoT) requirements, a large number of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols have been proposed in scientific literature, many of which are designed for specific application domains. However, for most of these MAC protocols, no multi-platform software implementation is available. In fact, the path from conceptual MAC protocol proposed in theoretical papers, towards an actual working implementation is rife with pitfalls. (i) A first problem is the timing bugs, frequently encountered in MAC implementations. (ii) Furthermore, once implemented, many MAC protocols are strongly optimized for specific hardware, thereby limiting the potential of software reuse or modifications. (iii) Finally, in real-life conditions, the performance of the MAC protocol varies strongly depending on the actual underlying radio chip. As a result, the same MAC protocol implementation acts differently per platform, resulting in unpredictable/asymmetrical behavior when multiple platforms are combined in the same network. This paper describes in detail the challenges related to multi-platform MAC development, and experimentally quantifies how the above issues impact the MAC protocol performance when running MAC protocols on multiple radio chips. Finally, an overall methodology is proposed to avoid the previously mentioned cross-platform compatibility issues.

Effects of Various Factors on Performance of MAC Protocols for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Research on underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) is an emerging area. This domain offers challenges and opportunities dynamically. Acoustic communication is one of the most mature technologies in this domain. Existing medium access control (MAC) protocol for terrestrial WSNs are not sufficient to solve the issues in UWSNs due to their limitations. Therefore, to design a new MAC protocols for UWSNs, it is required to study the factors which can affect the performance of MAC protocols in underwater environment. In this paper, we highlight the factors which cause degradation of performance for MAC protocol in terms of energy efficiency. In addition, this paper also focuses on simulation-based experimental results to compare the performance of MAC protocols under data rate factor.

TraPy-MAC: Traffic Priority Aware Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Body Area Network.

Recently, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has witnessed significant attentions in research and product development due to the growing number of sensor-based applications in healthcare domain. Design of efficient and effective Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is one of the fundamental research themes in WBAN. Static on-demand slot allocation to patient data is the main approach adopted in the design of MAC protocol in literature, without considering the type of patient data specifically the level of severity on patient data. This leads to the degradation of the performance of MAC protocols considering effectiveness and traffic adjustability in realistic medical environments. In this context, this paper proposes a Traffic Priority-Aware MAC (TraPy-MAC) protocol for WBAN. It classifies patient data into emergency and non-emergency categories based on the severity of patient data. The threshold value aided classification considers a number of parameters including type of sensor, body placement location, and data transmission time for allocating dedicated slots patient data. Emergency data are not required to carry out contention and slots are allocated by giving the due importance to threshold value of vital sign data. The contention for slots is made efficient in case of non-emergency data considering threshold value in slot allocation. Moreover, the slot allocation to emergency and non-emergency data are performed parallel resulting in performance gain in channel assignment. Two algorithms namely, Detection of Severity on Vital Sign data (DSVS), and ETS Slots allocation based on the Severity on Vital Sign (ETS-SVS) are developed for calculating threshold value and resolving the conflicts of channel assignment, respectively. Simulations are performed in ns2 and results are compared with the state-of-the-art MAC techniques. Analysis of results attests the benefit of TraPy-MAC in comparison with the state-of-the-art MAC in channel assignment in realistic medical environments.

An optimal power control algorithm for STDMA MAC protocols in multihop wireless networks

Multihop spatial time division multiple access (STDMA) medium access control (MAC) protocols constitute an important building block of wireless networks. There are not many practical power control algorithms that can optimally tradeoff power consumption against transmission rates with a reasonable computational complexity. In this paper, we introduce an energy-efficient distributed power control algorithm for STDMA MAC protocols. The motivation for this study is two fold, namely, maximizing the spatial reuse of the system resources and maximizing power efficiency. We develop a mathematical formulation for maximizing spatial reuse and power efficiency under discrete SINR and rate constrains. After proving that power is a convex function of data rates in our problem, we demonstrate that our problem in simultaneous transmission environments can be reduced to a linear programming (LP) problem. Then, we solve this LP problem using dynamic programming (DP). Finally, based on our proposed solution, we propose a low complexity optimal power control (OPC) algorithm which can be generically embedded within any existing STDMA MAC protocol. Through analytical and experimental studies, we show that our power control algorithm cannot only significantly improve the throughput, power consumption, and delay performance of STDMA MAC protocols compared to their baseline alternatives, but also outperform existing STDMA algorithms.

A survey of IEEE 802.15.4 effective system parameters for wireless body sensor networks

SummaryWireless body sensor networks are offered to meet the requirements of a diverse set of applications such as health‐related and well‐being applications. For instance, they are deployed to measure, fetch and collect human body vital signs. Such information could be further used for diagnosis and monitoring of medical conditions. IEEE 802.15.4 is arguably considered as a well‐designed standard protocol to address the need for low‐rate, low‐power and low‐cost wireless body sensor networks. Apart from the vast deployment of this technology, there are still some challenges and issues related to the performance of the medium access control (MAC) protocol of this standard that are required to be addressed. This paper comprises two main parts. In the first part, the survey has provided a thorough assessment of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol performance where its functionality is evaluated considering a range of effective system parameters, that is, some of the MAC and application parameters and the impact of mutual interference. The second part of this paper is about conducting a simulation study to determine the influence of varying values of the system parameters on IEEE 802.15.4 performance gains. More specifically, we explore the dependability level of IEEE 802.5.4 performance gains on a candidate set of system parameters. Finally, this paper highlights the tangible needs to conduct more investigations on particular aspect(s) of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

TDMA-Based MAC Protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: A Survey, Qualitative Analysis, and Open Research Issues

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted a lot of attention in the research community in recent years due to their promising applications. VANETs help improve traffic safety and efficiency. Each vehicle can exchange information to inform other vehicles about the current status of the traffic flow or a dangerous situation such as an accident. Road safety and traffic management applications require a reliable communication scheme with minimal transmission collisions, which thus increase the need for an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol. However, the design of the MAC in a vehicular network is a challenging task due to the high speed of the nodes, the frequent changes in topology, the lack of an infrastructure, and various QoS requirements. Recently, several time-division multiple-access (TDMA)-based MAC protocols have been proposed for VANETs in an attempt to ensure that all the vehicles have enough time to send safety messages without collisions and to reduce the end-to-end delay and the packet loss ratio. In this paper, we identify the reasons for using the collision-free MAC paradigm in VANETs. We then present a novel topology-based classification, and we provide an overview of TDMA-based MAC protocols that have been proposed for VANETs. We focus on the characteristics of these protocols, as well as on their benefits and limitations. Finally, we give a qualitative comparison, and we discuss some open issues that need to be tackled in future studies in order to improve the performance of TDMA-based MAC protocols for vehicle-to-vehicle communications.

Dynamic Link Adaptation and Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks based on Energy Harvesting of MAC Protocols

design of energy harvesting device is main part of MAC design. Recently the efficient method for energy harvesting (EH) device design for MAC protocols of WSN is studied. Practically this method proven it's efficient in terms of delivery ratio as well as energy consumption. This approach is focused on system-level considerations for networks operating with EH devices, by addressing the analysis and design of medium access control (MAC) protocols for single-hop wireless sensor networks, where a fusion center (FC) collect the data from sensors in its surrounding. Specifically, we investigate how performance and design of MAC protocols routinely used in WSNs, such as TDMA, framed-ALOHA (FA) and dynamic-FA (DFA). The energy efficiency is improved by using this MAC protocol with energy harvesting. However we can still further improve this method of energy harvesting with MAC protocol by introducing the use of energy efficient routing protocols along with link adaptation technique. Efficient routing algorithm can save a significant amount of energy in a network where routing occurs frequently. In WSN, routing protocols also plays important part for efficient energy utilization. In this paper we are further extending this energy efficient design of EH device for MAC protocols by adding dynamic link adaptation technique and the energy efficient routing protocol to it.

ARA MAC - A Qualifying Approach for improving Attack Resiliency and Adaptivity for Medium Access Control Protocol in WLAN 802. 11

The exponential growth of wireless network in recent years has brought some major research issues that include a fair share of the available bandwidth, quality of service (QoS) and control of misbehaving traffic nodes/sources. However, in wireless networks, including cellular, Ad Hoc, and sensor networks, that are based on a shared medium and often contention-oriented protocols, these issues have not been fully addressed. Most wireless networks are based on IEEE 802.11x standards which provide public wireless access to the Internet. The medium access control (MAC) in IEEE 802.11 uses a distributed contention resolution mechanism for sharing the channel. If the MAC protocol is manipulated or misused, then the consequences can be overwhelming, such as the disruption of the whole network. A selfish/cheater node [10] can manipulate the MAC protocol in different ways to gain access to the channel resulting in some cases of starvation of other nodes in the same network. The manipulation of the MAC layer protocol is hidden from the upper layers, and can be further enhanced if combined with more violations from these upper layers of the ISO/OSI Model. In wireless networks i.e. IEEE 802.11, all nodes contending to access the medium made-up to follow the rules of the Medium Access Control (MAC) sub layer. As the number of nodes increases; the probability of collisions obviously increases which causes longer back-off values of the collided nodes. A suspicious node may be either selfish node (or misbehaving node) which attempts to manipulate its back-off parameters of the CSMA / CA protocol to gain more and more access to the channel, hence get higher performance than their fair share. Suspicious nodes (Misbehavior Node). Which may be an attacker and can increase collisions to decrease the performance of MAC protocols by disobeying CSMA/CA or back-off rules. In this work, we discussed, analyzed and used selfish behavior by attackers to create an opportunist node. We also identified, declared and finally discard/disassociate the attacker nodes in IEEE 802.11 MAC layer environment. The Access point (AP) Allow most of the nodes offers more bandwidth (in terms of the extra number of slots to almost each node) while maintaining fairness if channel utilization is poor and this mode is called opportunist mode. The Proposed Protocol is called as the ARA-MAC. The performance of our method is evaluated through a simulation model to test efficiency. Various parameters are the basis for comparison between the implemented method and CSMA/CA. Key Performance Parameters i.e. Packet Delivery Ratio, RTS/Data Frames, Mean no. Of retry per frame have been used for comparison and performance evaluation. The results show that our proposed algorithm ARA-MAC outperforms basic CSMA/CA in terms of Attack Resiliency and Adaptability. ARA-MAC is able to detect and discard attacker nodes after identification of its maliciousness and also it provides adaptability in existing CSMA/CA. The time period for monitoring of node behavior varies according to the Fibonacci series to identify random timing attackers and also it reduces unnecessary execution of ARA-MAC algorithm at AP (Access Point). This is predominantly important in a distributed system where power consumption is a big concern especially in the case of Wireless Sensor Network. It is also important in a centralized system where constant monitoring of a large number of sources from the Access Point (AP) alone may become promptly a big burden on it. The main purpose of this work is to increase the channel utilization by offering opportunities to a node, and detect such node that is using this concept to degrade the network performance in terms of degraded channel utilization. General Terms Protocol Modification and System Development for Attack Resiliency at MAC Layer.

Joint Design of Ranging and Media Access Control in Underwater Acoustic Networks

Due to the unique characteristics of underwater acoustic channels, most wireless protocols need necessary modifications before being applied to underwater acoustic networks. In order to match underwater environment better and achieve higher performance, underwater acoustic networks are calling for cross-layer design with integrated functions implementing. This paper discusses about how to integrate the ranging technique and media access control (MAC) together. Ranging plays a key role in forming a network topology. However, the independent ranging process in an underwater acoustic network requires frequently media access and affects the performance of MAC protocols. In this paper, a joint design of ranging and MAC was proposed to solve the problem. MAC signals are reused to estimate the range. By applying ranging solutions for Aloha and MACAW, good range estimation was obtained in underwater networks. An undersea experiment was carried out to verify this solution. The experimental results show that the joint design of ranging and MAC is capable to work well in underwater acoustic networks.

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.

Performance Evaluation of MAC Protocols for Ad-hoc Networks using Directional Antenna

An Ad-hoc network is a dynamic network farmed on demand by a group of nodes without any pre-existing network infrastructure. Self configurability and easy deployment feature of the Mobile Ad-hoc network (MANET) resulted in numerous applications in modern era. An efficient and effective medium access control (MAC) protocol is essential in ad-hoc network for proper sharing of channel. The omnidirectional antenna has been used in traditional MAC protocols. More intensive attention is given toward the directional antenna by researchers due to capability of spatial reuse and other beneficial features. Main focuses of this paper is to discus and evaluate the performance of MAC protocol using omni-directional and directional antenna. We conducted a comparative simulation study of different MAC protocols using Omni-directional and directional antenna. Performance metrics like throughput and delay are used for the performance analysis. On the basis of result derived from simulation a comparison among these MAC protocols using directional antenna is given.

Orthogonal signaling-based queue status investigation method in IEEE 802.11

IEEE 802.11 specifies four different medium access control (MAC) protocols to coordinate multiple access in a wireless local area network (WLAN). Since several tens of stations can operate in a WLAN, the performance of MAC protocols is important for overall network efficiency. It has been observed that the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols can be improved by knowing which station has a non-empty queue, i.e., queue status. The point coordination function (PCF) can use this information to avoid polling a station that has no pending data. The HCF controlled channel access can adapt polling parameters based on queue status information, especially when scheduling a bursty and variable bit-rate traffic. Previously suggested methods are rather limited in terms of accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel method to investigate the queue status of multiple stations by exploiting orthogonal signaling. With synchronous transmission of orthogonal codes and symbol level signal processing, the method allows all of the associated stations to report their queue status at the same time. Challenges that can arise in the implementation of the proposed method are identified, and their solutions are suggested. The feasibility of detecting orthogonal signals is thoroughly tested on a realistic channel model. To demonstrate the performance improvement of a MAC protocol, we applied the proposed method to PCF. Both analysis and simulation show that the modified PCF significantly outperforms not only the original PCF but also other previously suggested PCF enhancements.

On the Impact of Channel Estimation Errors on MAC Protocols for MIMO Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for MIMO ad hoc networks under imperfect channel estimation. To this end, we also present an analysis of channel estimation errors using correlator-based and Minimum Mean-Square Error (MMSE) channel estimators. Unlike similar works, we specifically focus on a scenario where the presence of several simultaneous, symbol-asynchronous signals makes the problem more complicated than in traditional channel estimation. In particular, we show that there is direct dependence of the channel estimation error on the instantaneous channel matrix. The model we propose in this paper makes it possible to quickly evaluate the performance of channel estimation schemes as a function of the system parameters. In this light, we include the effect of channel estimation errors in an ad hoc networking protocol simulator and thoroughly evaluate their impact. Our results show that there exists a significant interplay between the performance of MAC protocols for MIMO networks and the accuracy of channel estimation. Moreover, we show that interesting tradeoffs arise between MAC- and physical level-related parameters.

Effect of Impulse Radio–Ultrawideband Based on Energy Collection on MAC Protocol Performance

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> In this paper, we analyze the effects of the probabilities of detection, false alarm, and frame collision survival (in the presence of simultaneous transmissions) on medium access control (MAC) protocols using impulse-radio–ultrawideband (IR–UWB) energy-collection noncoherent receivers. The MAC protocols that were considered are all IEEE 802.15.4 compatible, i.e., the IEEE 802.15.4a optional UWB clear-channel-assessment mode, the IEEE 802.15.4a ALOHA mode, and a protocol termed preamble sense multiple access (PSMA). The impact on the network throughput, energy consumption, and delay are analytically derived and verified by simulation. The results show that these effects have a considerable impact on the performance of IR–UWB MAC protocols, and a classical analysis does not properly evaluate the protocols’ performances. The results compare the performances of the MAC protocols and highlight a number of issues with regard to adapting narrowband protocols to UWB systems. The probability of frame collision survival on simultaneous transmissions is shown to have a significant impact on the performance of a MAC protocol. The comparison shows superior performance of the PSMA protocol under typical wireless-sensor-network operation ranges. </para>