Wireless Medium Access Control Research Articles

Energy-Efficient Network Protocols and Resilient Data Transmission Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks—An Experimental Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are considerably used for various environmental sensing applications. The architecture and internal specifications of WSNs have been chosen based on the requirements of particular applications. On this basis, WSNs consist of resource (energy and memory)-limited wireless sensor nodes. WSNs initiate data communication from source to destination via physical layer management principles, channel slot scheduling principles (time division multiple access), wireless medium access control (WMAC) protocols, wireless routing protocols and application protocols. In this environment, the development of WMAC principles, routing protocols and channel allotment schemes play crucial roles in network communication phases. Consequently, these layering functions consume more energy at each sensor node, which leads to minimal network lifetime. Even though the channel management schemes, medium control protocols and routing protocols are functionally suitable, the excessive energy consumption affects the overall network performance. In this situation, energy optimization algorithms are advised to minimize the resource wastage of WSNs during regular operations (medium control and routing process). Many research works struggle to identify the optimal energy-efficient load balancing strategies to improve WSN functions. With this in mind, the proposed article has conducted a detailed literature review and notable experimental comparisons on energy-efficient MAC protocols, channel scheduling policies and energy-efficient routing protocols. To an extent, the detailed analysis over these wireless network operations helps to understand the benefits and limitations of recent research works. In the experimental section of this article, eight existing techniques are evaluated under energy optimization strategies (WMAC, channel allocation, sleep/wake protocols, integrated routing and WMAC policies, balanced routing and cooperative routing). The proposed review and the classified technical observations collected from notable recent works have been recognized as crucial contributions. The results infer the suggestions for feasible WSN communication strategies with optimal channel management policies and routing policies. Notably, the simulation results show that cross-layer or multi-layer energy optimization policies perform better than homogeneous energy optimization models.

Interleaved Honeypot-Framing Model with Secure MAC Policies for Wireless Sensor Networks

The Wireless Medium Access Control (WMAC) protocol functions by handling various data frames in order to forward them to neighbor sensor nodes. Under this circumstance, WMAC policies need secure data communication rules and intrusion detection procedures to safeguard the data from attackers. The existing secure Medium Access Control (MAC) policies provide expected and predictable practices against channel attackers. These security policies can be easily breached by any intelligent attacks or malicious actions. The proposed Wireless Interleaved Honeypot-Framing Model (WIHFM) newly implements distributed honeypot-based security mechanisms in each sensor node to act reactively against various attackers. The proposed WIHFM creates an optimal Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) channel model, Wireless Interleaved Honeypot Frames (WIHFs), secure hash-based random frame-interleaving principles, node-centric honeypot engines, and channel-covering techniques. Compared to various existing MAC security policies, the proposed model transforms unpredictable IHFs into legitimate frame sequences against channel attackers. Additionally, introducing WIHFs is a new-fangled approach for distributed WSNs. The successful development of the proposed WIHFM ensures resilient security standards and neighbor-based intrusion alert procedures for protecting MAC frames. Particularly, the proposed wireless honeypot methodology creates a novel idea of using honeypot frame traps against open wireless channel attacks. The development of a novel wireless honeypot traps deals with various challenges such as distributed honeypot management principles (node-centric honeypot, secretly interleaved-framing principles, and interleaving/de-interleaving procedures), dynamic network backbone management principles (On Demand Acyclic Connectivity model), and distributed attack isolation policies. This effort provides an effective wireless attack-trapping solution in dynamic WSNs. The simulation results show the advantage of the proposed WIHFM over the existing techniques such as Secure Zebra MAC (SZ-MAC), Blockchain-Assisted Secure-Routing Mechanism (BASR), and the Trust-Based Node Evaluation (TBNE) procedure. The experimental section confirms the proposed model attains a 10% to 14% superior performance compared to the existing techniques.

A Hybrid Network User Satisfaction-Based Downlink Scheduling in LTE-A Network

To provide high-quality wireless network multimedia services, the 4G/5G network media access control (MAC) layer has adopted the concept of the quality of service (QoS) with different traffic classification service requirements. To efficiently allocate the limited radio resources for achieving a good balance in QoS, throughput and fairness are necessary for the wireless network MAC scheduling issues. While many conventional scheduling schemes only considered one factor: rate or delay, network users might actually have different rate and delay requirements in concert. Herein, a hybrid network user satisfaction-based downlink scheduling approach, namely, max rate delay urgency first (MRDUF), is developed. The MRDUF approach simultaneously considers rate and delay requirements and adopts a hybrid strategy comprising time- and frequency-domain schedulers using two schemes, namely, the first come first serve (FCFS) and max throughput (MT), for the LTE-A downlink environment. Simulation study results have shown that our proposed approach outperforms the conventional scheduling schemes, including MT, proportional fair (PF), blind equal throughput (BET), and earliest deadline first (EDF). The benefit of MRDUF in terms of fairness of satisfaction of rate and delay is demonstrated by the simulation study.

Distributed Reinforcement Learning for scalable wireless medium access in IoTs and sensor networks

This paper presents a distributed Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for synthesizing wireless network protocols in IoT and Wireless Sensor Networks with low-complexity transceivers. Wireless medium access control (MAC) behavior is first formulated as a Multi-agent Markov Decision Process (MAMDP), and then solved using distributed Reinforcement Learning as a temporal difference MDP solution method. Since the proposed learning approach is distributed, it allows network nodes to independently learn optimal MAC-layer transmission strategies for maximizing network throughput. It is shown that by learning with limited network information from up to two-hop neighborhoods, the proposed paradigm can offer network throughput that is comparable with the known benchmark obtained from the ALOHA family of protocols. It is also demonstrated that unlike with ALOHA, the proposed RL based MAC layer can adjust its transmission strategies such that the maximum throughout can be sustained at higher and heterogenous traffic load conditions. Another distinctive feature of the proposed mechanism is that the wireless bandwidth can be shared more equitably than the benchmark ALOHA, especially in the presence of load and topological heterogeneities. The mechanism is also able to change nodes’ access priorities parametrically while learning, which can be useful for sensing applications with heterogeneous wireless bandwidth needs. Finally, the online MAC learning abilities are shown to be able to adjust nodes’ transmission policies on the fly in a dynamic network traffic environment.

Adaptive cluster‐based heuristic approach in cognitive radio networks for5Gapplications

AbstractThe main objective of cognitive radio network is to provide flexible spectrum management, by permitting the secondary users (SUs) to temporarily access the licensed spectrum in the absence of a primary user. In the existing backward induction approach, each SU performs spectrum sensing and consequently reports the sensing details to the centralized controller. In the proposed work, an adaptive cluster‐based heuristic approach (ACBHA) with cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) scheme has been proposed for cognitive radio medium access control networks for 5G applications. To identify the availability of unused spectrum, the proposed CSS‐based ACBHA algorithm adopts a cluster‐based selection scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed CSS‐based ACBHA provides a better result compared with existing techniques. The performance parameters such as false alarm probability, the probability of detection, spectrum sensing time, slot length, noise density have been analyzed using MATLAB R2012a.

Architecting a priority-based dynamic media access control mechanism in Wireless Network-on-Chip

Wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC) are being examined for parallel applications to improve the performances by reducing multi-hop latency. Wireless nodes handle massive data transmission assignment, the data bandwidth and energy efficiency of the WiNoC architecture can be improved by establishing wireless links to respond to dynamically changing traffic patterns. Among them, the wireless token mechanism is widely used, since it would take little additional hardware overhead and simple operation process. However, the traditional wireless token mechanism is a time-division-multiplexed fair strategy, and cannot well cope with non-uniform traffic patterns. In this paper, a priority-based dynamic media access control (MAC) mechanism in wireless network-on-chip is architected by redefining MAC mechanism, which aims to make wireless MAC protocols more suitable for non-uniform traffic patterns. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme in this paper guarantees the network performance equivalent to the traditional token mechanism in random traffic mode, and the network throughput is increased by 14%–15% in the hotspot mode. Compared with the traditional token mechanism, the average packet delay is greatly reduced before the saturation point with little extra hardware overhead introduced simultaneously.

In-Band Full Duplex Wireless LANs: Medium Access Control Protocols, Design Issues and Their Challenges

In-band full duplex wireless medium access control (MAC) protocol is essential in order to enable higher layers of the protocol stack to exploit the maximum benefits from physical layer full duplex technology. Unlike half duplex wireless local area network, a full duplex MAC protocol has to deal with several unique issues and challenges that arise because of the dynamic nature of the wireless environment. In this paper, we have discussed several existing full duplex MAC protocols and have shown qualitative comparisons among these full duplex MAC protocols. Full duplex in-band wireless communication has the potential to double the capacity of wireless network. Inter-client Interference (ICI) is a hindrance in achieving double spectral efficiency of the in-band full-duplex wireless medium. In this paper, we have classified existing solutions to the ICI problem and compared the solutions with respect to the proposed approaches, their advantages and disadvantages.We have also identified and discussed several issues and challenges of designing a full duplex MAC protocol. Results of qualitative comparisons of various wireless full duplex MAC protocols may be applied to design new protocols as well as researchers may find the identified issues and challenges helpful to solve various problems of a full duplex MAC protocol.

Self-organization Scheme of WSNs with Mobile Sensors and Mobile Multiple Sinks for Big Data Computing

With the advent of IoT technology and Big Data computing, the importance of WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) has been on the rise. For energy-efficient and collection-efficient delivery of any sensed data, lots of novel wireless medium access control (MAC) protocols have been proposed and these MAC schemes are the basis of many IoT systems that leads the upcoming fourth industrial revolution. WSNs play a very important role in collecting Big Data from various IoT sensors. Also, due to the limited amount of battery driving the sensors, energy-saving MAC technologies have been recently studied. In addition, as new IoT technologies for Big Data computing emerge to meet different needs, both sensors and sinks need to be mobile. To guarantee stability of WSNs with dynamic topologies as well as frequent physical changes, the existing MAC schemes must be tuned for better adapting to the new WSN environment which includes energy-efficiency and collection-efficiency of sensors, coverage of WSNs and data collecting methods of sinks. To address these issues, in this paper, a self-organization scheme for mobile sensor networks with mobile multiple sinks has been proposed and verified to adapt both mobile sensors and multiple sinks to 3-dimensional group management MAC protocol. Performance evaluations show that the proposed scheme outperforms the previous schemes in terms of the various usage cases. Therefore, the proposed self-organization scheme might be adaptable for various computing and networking environments with big data.

Performance Analysis of Different Channel Allocation Schemes of Random Access (RA) MAC Protocol with Back-Off Algorithm (BOA)

Cognitive radio technology is an effective method to improve the utilization and efficiency of radio spectrum. Cognitive radio technology solves spectrum scarcity problem by allowing cognitive users to use spectrum holes when primary users are absent. Cognitive radio networks are classified according to the infrastructure into: (A) centralized cognitive radio networks and (B) cognitive radio ad-hoc networks. The cognitive media access control (MAC) protocols are the master key of designing cognitive radio network. These allow cognitive users to identify and use the available frequency spectrum in a manner constrains the levels of interference to the primary users. Cognitive radio MAC protocols can be classified into: (A) random access control protocol (B) time slotted control protocols (C) hybrid protocols. In this paper, the dynamic open spectrum sharing (DOSS) MAC protocol is proposed as an example for random access control protocol. Due to the collision among users, the network throughput will be reduced. In order to enhance the performance of DOSS protocol, a back-off algorithm (BOA) will be executed and analyzed to enhance the network throughput. An optimum number of data retransmissions that decrease blocking and dropping ratio are investigated. Moreover, two accessing channels techniques for the proposed algorithm will be presented: fixed channel allocation (FCA) and dynamic channel allocation (DCA) schemes. DCA scheme allows to users to choose the control channel in a dynamic manner. The dynamic behavior decreases the limitation of control channel saturation. So, it can increase the network throughput. The performance analysis of the FCA and DCA schemes for the proposed protocol will be simulated. Finally, the performance analysis of DCA scheme of DOSS mac protocol with BOA will be investigated.

Slot Self-Allocation Based MAC Protocol for Energy Harvesting Nano-Networks.

Nano-networks are composed of interconnected nano-nodes and can enable unprecedented applications in various fields. Due to the peculiarities of nano-networks, such as high density, extremely limited energy and computational resources, traditional carrier-sensing based Media Access Control (MAC) protocols are not suitable for nano-networks. In this paper, a Slot Self-Allocation based MAC protocol (SSA-MAC) is proposed for energy harvesting nano-networks. Two transmission schemes for centralized and distributed nano-networks are designed, respectively. In centralized nano-networks, nano-nodes can only send packets to the nano-controller in their Self-Allocation Slots (SASs), while, in distributed nano-networks, nano-nodes can only receive packets from surrounding nano-nodes in their SASs. Extensive simulations were conducted to compare the proposed SSA-MAC with PHysical LAyer aware MAC (PHLAME), Receiver-Initiated Harvesting-aware MAC (RIH-MAC) and Energy Efficient Wireless NanoSensor Network MAC (EEWNSN). From the results, it can be concluded that the proposed SSA-MAC achieves better performance and can reduce the collision probability, while improving the energy efficiency of nano-networks.

Design of an adaptive medium access control protocol for wireless body area networks with heterogeneous sensors

The IEEE 802.15.6 standard emerged as the most suitable standard that fits the special requirements of wireless body area networks. It provides flexibility to designers by recommending the use of several medium access control layer techniques, but does not specify how to combine some or all these recommended techniques to form the most efficient wireless body area network medium access control for a specific scenario. Our goal here is to design a wireless body area network medium access control that provides an optimal combination of these basic techniques that are available in the standard, by taking into consideration the variability and heterogeneity of the sensors. The performance of the proposed techniques is evaluated using some of the standard performance measures such as throughput, delay, and energy consumption.

Request-Based Polling Access: Investigation of Novel Wireless LAN MAC Scheme for Low-Latency E-Health Applications

For hospital e-health systems, a novel medium access control (MAC) scheme that achieves delay-sensitive healthcare traffic (DSHT) delivery in the uplink direction of wireless local area networks (WLANs) is proposed and investigated. By introducing a slotted request uploading period and informing hubs to upload their transmission requests orderly during the period, overhead cost associated with frequent transmitter/receiver transitions can be reduced and polling empty hubs can be eliminated. Consequently, the proposed scheme results in in-time polling of hubs, thereby optimizing packet queuing delay. Moreover, due to centralized coordination, the proposed scheme avoids contention and back-off. Such an MAC scheme is critical to the Internet of Things (IoT)-based delay-sensitive healthcare applications (DSHAs), such as unmanned patient tending and tele-diagnose/surgery in future e-health systems. Our simulation results show that under a delay constraint of $200~\mu \text{s}$ , the proposed scheme outperforms both the conventional point coordination function (PCF) and distributed coordination function (DCF) schemes in terms of DSHT throughput and has a good DSHT delivery stability performance.

Research on Underwater Wireless Sensor Network and MAC Protocol and Location Algorithm

In recent years, underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have received extensive attention due to their application in the development of marine resources. The underwater acoustic channel has a long delay, low bandwidth, and highly dynamic changes in the underwater environment so that the existing technologies and protocols in the traditional wireless sensor network cannot be directly applied to underwater. This paper studies the medium access control (MAC) protocol and positioning technology of UWSNs and introduces the typical underwater line sensor network MAC protocol. Aiming at the problem of spatial fairness caused by the propagation characteristics of the underwater acoustic channel and the triple terminal problem caused by the long propagation delay in UWSNs, and effectively implementing the multi-channel mechanism, an underwater multi-channel based on a single transceiver is proposed, which is SFM-MAC. The existing underwater positioning algorithms are divided into two categories, centralized positioning algorithm and distributed positioning algorithm, and each type of algorithm is briefly explained. In this paper, the Markov chain is used to construct the reservation model of the control channel, and the theoretical analysis of multi-channel throughput is given. The theoretical throughput of the multi-channel MAC protocol under the condition of reserved collision is obtained. Finally, this paper verifies the actual performance of SFM-MAC through simulation experiments.

A Survey on the Programmability of Wireless MAC Protocols

Self-organizing networks able to adapt to changes in the environment have already been a longstanding research topic. Given the limited number of license-free industrial, scientific, and medical radio bands, wireless technologies end up competing with one another for the wireless spectrum. As such, the proper employment of medium access control (MAC) protocols is essential to guarantee efficient and reliable wireless communication. At the data link level, there has been extensive research toward programmable and more future-proof MAC protocols ( e.g., software-defined radios (SDRs), which enable to reconfigure the entire protocol and hence access/control fine-grained radio functionalities). However, actual deployments are so far limited because of performance issues and cost. With the increasing popularity of software-defined networking, also in the wireless domain, and the increasing performance of SDRs, we are evolving into a fully programmable data link layer. In this survey, we deliver: a landscape of the state-of-the-art on programmable MAC protocols; a coherent terminology that represents scope and level of programmability supported; an in-depth study of their advantages and disadvantages; and a discussion about future research challenges on MAC programmability. Many surveys have investigated the use of specific MAC protocols for a wide range of optimization criteria and application demands. This survey is the first that investigates the scope and the level of programmability that MAC protocols support.

Wireless Full-Duplex Medium Access Control for Enhancing Energy Efficiency

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of battery-powered mobile devices, e.g., smartphones, tablets, sensors, and laptops, which leads a significant demand for high capacity wireless communication with high energy efficiency. Among technologies to provide the efficiency is full-duplex wireless communication. Full-duplex wireless enhances capacity by simultaneously transmitting uplink and downlink data with limited frequency resources. Previous studies on full-duplex wireless mostly focuses on doubling the network capacity, whereas in this paper we discuss that full-duplex wireless can also provide higher energy efficiency. We propose low power communication by wireless full-duplexing (LPFD), focusing on the fact that the full-duplex communication duration becomes half of the halfduplex communication duration. In the LPFD, by using the sleep state in which the transceiver provided in the wireless communication terminal is turned off, power consumption of the wireless communication terminal is reduced and energy efficiency in wireless full duplex is improved. Simulation results show that the energy efficiency achieved by LPFD is up to approximately 17.3 times higher than the energy efficiency achieved by existing full-duplex medium access protocol. Further, it is up to approximately 27.5 times higher than the energy efficiency using power saving mode of half-duplex communication.

Wireless Body Area Networks MAC Protocol For Energy Efficiency and Extending Lifetime

Wireless body area networks (WBANs), as an important part of the Internet of things and sensor networks, are becoming more important in health monitoring and entertainment services. The sensor nodes in these applications need to transmit information data to personal station and receive control information from personal station to adjust working modes. However, unlike an easily rechargeable personal station, body sensor nodes suffer from energy shortages, which affect the nodes lifetimes. To solve this problem, we design a novel medium access control (MAC) layer protocol to enhance the energy efficiency and extend the lifetime of body sensor nodes in WBANs. The proposed protocol utilizes a hybrid scheme by taking advantage of carrier-sense multiple accesses with the collision avoidance and time division multiple access schemes. In addition, we allocate the main transmission overhead at the personal station side and design a novel awaiting order state for sensor nodes to improve energy efficiency. Also, the analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol can provide a 6 to 15 decrease in energy consumption from other protocols.

A Slotted Sense Multiple Access Protocol for Timely and Reliable Data Transmission in Dynamic Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless medium access control protocol that uses a topology-dependent slot schedule is vulnerable to link failures. This becomes severer in industrial fields due to node mobility and various obstructions unfriendly to wireless communication. The proposed protocol allocates a big sharable slot (SS) to each tree level, producing a topology-independent schedule that makes the protocol highly responsive to the changes of topology. Then, the nodes at the same level use carrier sense multiple access (CSMA)/CA for data transmission and channel hopping to cope with the varying condition of a channel. The use of CSMA/CA and channel hoping makes data transmission reliable against internal and external interferences. Another feature is that every node gets its SS using a slot generation function independently of other nodes. Simulations and experiments verify that the proposed protocol achieves good performance in terms of packet delivery ratio and energy efficiency against the variation of multipath fading, various external sources of interference, and node mobility.

A review of wireless access vehicular environment multichannel operational medium access control protocols: Quality-of-service analysis and other related issues

In recent years, the increase in vehicular traffic has led to a drastic increase in road accidents, thus requiring adequate vehicle safety measures. The intelligent transportation system is a branch of modern technology responsible for delivering such road safety services. The wireless access vehicular environment standard defines how these intelligent transportation system applications can be incorporated in highly varying vehicular ad hoc network environments. Wireless access vehicular environment comprises the IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 1609.4 standards responsible for handling medium access control and transmission mechanisms in vehicular ad hoc networks. However, these standards still face medium access control and physical layer challenges, which must be addressed for reliable quality of service. Several research studies have been proposed and are still underway into improving medium access control protocols in the wireless access vehicular environment stack model defined by IEEE 1609.4 multichannel oper...

An Energy Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Passive Sensor Networks

Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is one of the key network protocols that ensure Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) maintain high performance during communication. MAC protocol design plays an important role in improving the performances of the whole network. First, Wireless Passive Sensor Networks (WPSNs) and MAC protocols are introduced in this paper. Second, some existing MAC protocols are introduced. Sensor MAC (S-MAC) protocol is analyzed and existing improved backoff algorithms are introduced. A new MAC protocol called Improved Sensor MAC (IS-MAC) is then proposed to solve the problem that the contention window (CW) during carrier sense is fixed in S-MAC protocol. IS-MAC protocol is able to adjust CW in terms of network load, so energy consumption can be decreased. Finally, according to the simulation results on NS2, the proposed protocol has better performance in terms of throughput and energy consumption.

Boycott based enhanced correction scheme for mac layer misbehavior in wireless networks

In IEEE 802.11 standard, the wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) provides transmission fairness to nodes in a network, but some nodes that called misbehaving nodes (MNs) can take advantage and modify its MAC parameters to improve its own performance at the expense of other nodes (honest nodes HNs). Many solutions have been proposed to solve this problem, but most of these solutions are based on the assumption that MNs misbehave just one time. Therefor, in this paper, we propose a boycott based enhanced correction scheme for mac layer misbehavior in wireless networks to correct and react against MNs and increasing the HNs throughput.To correct these MNs, HNs collectively react and correct the MNs. When the misbehavior is detected for the first time, HNs react in an appropriate way by decreasing the throughput of MNs, but if MNs misbehave for the second time HNs start to react aggressively and consequently decrease MNs throughput dramatically. In the third misbehavior, HNs boycott the MNs and reject all messages that came from these nodes. Simulation result shows the efficiency of our proposed scheme to improve HNs throughput and boycott MNs.