MAC Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks Research Articles

Implementation of optimal routing in heterogeneous wireless sensor network with multi‐channel Media Access Control protocol using Enhanced Henry Gas Solubility Optimizer

SummaryThe majority of wireless sensor network (WSN) systems include multiple data traffic with different service requirements. Small batteries are used to supply energy to the sensor nodes. This research work explores a new optimal hybrid MAC protocol for heterogeneous WSN to carry out efficient routing. The major intention of the designed protocol is the incorporation of features of both IEEE 802.15.4 and Low‐Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) to solve the challenges. The energy‐saving circuit is adopted by predetermining the cluster heads (CHs), whereas the usual nodes are powered by a battery. Thus, it is suggested to extend the lifespan of network operation, where the designed hybrid protocol is intended to transfer the essential activities to the elected cluster heads when reducing the activity of the nodes. Here, a new optimizer known as the Enhanced Henry Gas Solubility Optimization (EHGSO) algorithm is suggested for selecting the cluster heads and also for promoting the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. This protocol is assisted to ensure performance regarding self‐healing, scalability, self‐reconfigurability, and energy efficiency. Thus, the performance evaluation is conducted in terms of various performance measures like throughput and energy consumption over the Adaptive Leach Protocol and multi‐channel MAC protocol with IEEE 802.15.4.

Design criteria for enhanced energy constraint MAC protocol for WSN

There are many different ways to describe a network. There are many tiny, light-weight wireless sensor nodes scattered throughout the environment to monitor and manage the environment. A sensor network's most fundamental component is the sensor node. Sensors, CPUs, a transceiver, memory, and a power supply are all on board. There are several devices in a wireless sensor network (WSN). The most important WSN criteria are network longevity, data collection, and security. " Wireless sensors' low cost and ease of deployment make them ideal for a wide range of real-time applications. Many MAC-layer protocols have been devised and are now being tested in an effort to limit the number of depletion methods. S-MAC protocol is the primary focus of our endeavour to implement the suggested model that supports the unique characteristics of optimization of synchronisation cycle. For example, Backoff Exponent is one of the strategies that are used to prevent collisions. Deriving the advantages of a successful communication system is made possible by our approach to node-to-node coordination. All nodes within the carrier sensing range are considered in our suggested scheme's random deployment topology.

SPEECH‐MAC: Special purpose energy‐efficient contention‐based hybrid MAC protocol for WSN and Zigbee network

SummaryEnergy‐efficient Zigbee‐based wireless sensor network (WSN) occupies a major role in emergency‐based applications. The foremost drawback of such applications is maintaining the battery power because frequent changing is not possible in those conditions. In the earlier days, several researches created new model MAC protocols in terms of increase the lifetime of the WSN. But still, there is a research gap particularly in emergency applications. In order to improve the lifetime of such applications, we introduced a novel hybrid MAC protocol, namely, special purpose energy‐efficient contention‐based hybrid MAC (SPEECH‐MAC) protocol. This protocol includes dual hop concept considerably to save the energy. Both the single hop network and the dual hop networks are developed, and the results are analyzed. Prioritization mechanism for SPEECH‐MAC protocol is introduced to analyze the emergency conditions in detail. In summary, according to the simulation, the calculated parameters are total residual energy, end‐to‐end delay, packet drop, packet delivery ratio, and network throughput.

Modeling of Duty-Cycled MAC Protocols for Heterogeneous WSN with Priorities

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have experienced an important revitalization, particularly with the arrival of Internet of Things applications. In a general sense, a WSN can be composed of different classes of nodes, having different characteristics or requirements (heterogeneity). Duty-cycling is a popular technique used in WSN, that allows nodes to sleep and wake up periodically in order to save energy. We believe that the modeling and performance evaluation of heterogeneous WSN with priorities operating in duty-cycling, being of capital importance for their correct design and successful deployment, have not been sufficiently explored. The present work presents a performance evaluation study of a WSN with these features. For a scenario with two classes of nodes composing the network, each with a different channel access priority, an approximate analytical model is developed with a pair of two-dimensional discrete-time Markov chains. Note that the same modeling approach can be used to analyze networks with a larger number of classes. Performance parameters such as average packet delay, throughput and average energy consumption are obtained. Analytical results are validated by simulation, showing accurate results. Furthermore, a new procedure to determine the energy consumption of nodes is proposed that significantly improves the accuracy of previous proposals. We provide quantitative evidence showing that the energy consumption accuracy improvement can be up to two orders of magnitude.

Performance evaluation of wireless sensor network MAC protocols with early sleep problem

Energy efficiency and increased throughput are the two major goals in the design of MAC protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The traditional sensor-MAC (S-MAC) and timeout-MAC (T-MAC) protocols have been proposed to achieve these dual desirable goals by proper scheduling of duty cycles. Although these protocols have been proved to excel the performance when compared with their predecessor protocols for MANETs, the idea of duty cycling, if not tuned carefully may not work well in some linear chain topologies. We, in this paper investigated the 'early sleep' problem in specific topologies which results in undesirable extended latency in packets delivery. In this paper, we evaluated the performance of T-MAC protocol with early sleep problem. As a solution to this problem, this work also proposes a disable extended timeout MAC (DETMAC) protocol that helps the forwarding nodes towards the sink node to adaptively re-schedule their sleep/wakeup timing. It is shown through simulation results that our proposed DETMAC protocol outperforms in the terms of throughput and energy efficiency when compared to T-MAC and its variants.

Performance Evaluation of Wireless Sensor Network MAC protocols with Early Sleep problem

Energy efficiency and increased throughput are the two major goals in the design of MAC protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The traditional sensor-MAC (S-MAC) and timeout-MAC (T-MAC) protocols have been proposed to achieve these dual desirable goals by proper scheduling of duty cycles. Although these protocols have been proved to excel the performance when compared with their predecessor protocols for MANETs, the idea of duty cycling, if not tuned carefully may not work well in some linear chain topologies. We, in this paper investigated the 'early sleep' problem in specific topologies which results in undesirable extended latency in packets delivery. In this paper, we evaluated the performance of T-MAC protocol with early sleep problem. As a solution to this problem, this work also proposes a disable extended timeout MAC (DETMAC) protocol that helps the forwarding nodes towards the sink node to adaptively re-schedule their sleep/wakeup timing. It is shown through simulation results that our proposed DETMAC protocol outperforms in the terms of throughput and energy efficiency when compared to T-MAC and its variants.

A Power-based Pipelined-forwarding MAC Protocol for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

A Power-based Pipelined-forwarding MAC Protocol for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Novel Two-Fold Data Aggregation and MAC Scheduling to Support Energy Efficient Routing in Wireless Sensor Network

Network lifetime maximization is the primary challenge in the wireless sensor network (WSN) due to its resource limitations. E <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> routing algorithm uses a hierarchical WSN model to minimize energy consumption in the WSN. However, it increases complexity, time consumption, and energy consumption due to the hierarchical model. To resolve these problems, this paper proposes a novel ring partitioned based MAC (RP-MAC) protocol for the energy-efficient WSN with a mobile sink node. Energy efficiency is achieved by the following phases: clustering phase, MAC scheduling phase, data aggregation phase, and routing phase. Clustering phase is initiated by a weighted Voronoi diagram (WVD) algorithm by assigning a weight value for each node. Energy consumption due to idle listening is minimized by enabling novel RP-MAC scheduling in each cluster. Involvement of RP-MAC protocol also achieves collision-free data transmission in the network. A two-fold data aggregation (TFDA) scheme is proposed for the data aggregation phase to minimize energy consumption by reducing the number of transmissions. Routing phase supports both intra-cluster routing and inter-cluster routing. For intra-cluster routing, a hybrid chicken swarm optimization algorithm is proposed. For inter-cluster routing, position-based routing tree is constructed based on the sink node’s position. Our proposed RP-MAC protocol minimizes energy consumption in all possible ways for improving the network lifetime. Extensive simulation in ns-3 shows that the RP-MAC protocol achieves promising results in the following performance metrics: the number of dead nodes, average energy consumption, network lifetime, and throughput.

EESRA: Energy Efficient Scalable Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Many recent wireless sensor network (WSN) routing protocols are enhancements to address specific issues with the “low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy” (LEACH) protocol. Since the performance of LEACH deteriorates sharply with increasing network size, the challenge for new WSN protocols is to extend the network lifespan while maintaining high scalability. This paper introduces an energy-efficient clustering and hierarchical routing algorithm named energy-efficient scalable routing algorithm (EESRA). The goal of the proposed algorithm is to extend the network lifespan despite an increase in network size. The algorithm adopts a three-layer hierarchy to minimize the cluster heads’ load and randomize the selection of cluster heads. Moreover, EESRA uses multi-hop transmissions for intra-cluster communications to implement a hybrid WSN MAC protocol. This paper compares EESRA against other WSN routing protocols in terms of network performance with respect to changes in the network size. The simulation results show that EESRA outperforms the benchmarked protocols in terms of load balancing and energy efficiency on large-scale WSNs.

A comprehensive review on energy harvesting MAC protocols in WSNs: Challenges and tradeoffs

Nowadays, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are broadly used to set up distributed monitoring infrastructures in self-healing, self-configuring, and self-managing systems. They are composed by many elementary devices (or motes) equipped with basic sensing, computing, and communications capabilities, which interact on a collaborative basis to sense a target environment and report collected data to one or more sinks. WSNs are expected to be operational for very long periods of time, even if each mote cannot bring large energy storage units. Accordingly, Energy Harvesting mechanisms can greatly magnify the expected lifetime of WSNs. Over the years, Energy Harvesting-Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSN) have been thoroughly studied by the scientific and industrial communities to bridge the gap from the vision to the reality. A critical facet of EH-WSN lies in the interplay between EH techniques and MAC protocols. In fact, while EH technologies feed motes with energy, the MAC layer is responsible for a significant quota of spent energy because of message transmission/reception and channel sensing operations. In addition, the energy brought by EH technologies is not easily predictable in advance because of time-varying nature: this makes the design of the MAC protocol even more challenging. To draw a comprehensive review of the state of the art on this subject, the present manuscript first provides a detailed analysis on existing energy harvesting systems for WSNs; then it extensively illustrates pros and cons of key MAC protocols for EH-WSNs with a special focus on: fundamental techniques, evaluation approaches, and key performance indicators. Finally, it summarizes lessons learned, provides design guidelines for MAC protocols in EH-WSNs, and outlooks the impact on Internet of Things.

A Comprehensive Study of IoT and WSN MAC Protocols: Research Issues, Challenges and Opportunities

Recent advances in wireless technologies, micro-electro-mechanical systems, and embedded systems enable the popular usage of the Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in many important applications, such as smart buildings, security, target tracking, industrial automation, and so on. Typically, a WSN consists of a large number of tiny, low-cost sensor nodes that are limited in terms of their capabilities of computation, communication, memory, and power. In WSNs, energy-efficient algorithms are of paramount importance for a long lasting high throughput network. MAC protocol plays a prominent role in extending the life-time of WSNs. MAC protocols provide various schemes on how multiple nodes access a common wireless medium. To achieve a longer lifetime for the nodes and the networks, MAC protocols need to be energy-efficient and reduce the sources of energy wastage. Energy conservation in sensor nodes is generally achieved by duty cycling the radios, and it is the MAC layer protocol that controls when to switch on and off the radio. In this paper, we discuss the essential properties of MAC protocols, the MAC for IoT and the common causes of energy consumptions. Thereafter, we categorize the MAC layer protocols and discuss several protocols under each category in depth, emphasizing their strengths and weaknesses, and giving a detailed comparison of MAC protocols. Finally, we conclude the survey with the insights on future research directions.

Minimizing the Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy in Wireless Sensor networks (WSNs) represents an essential factor in designing, controlling and operating the sensor networks. Minimizing the consumed energy in WSNs application is a crucial issue for the network effectiveness and efficiency in terms of lifetime, cost and operation. Number of algorithms and protocols were proposed and implemented to decrease the energy consumption. Principally, WSNs operate with battery-powered sensors. Since Sensor's batteries have not been easily recharge. Therefore, prediction of the WSN represents a significant concern. Basically, the network failure occurs due to the inefficient sensor's energy. MAC protocols in WSNs achieved low duty-cycle by employing periodic sleep and wakeup. Predictive Wakeup MAC (PW-MAC) protocol was made use of the asynchronous duty cycling. It reduces the consumption of the node energy by allowing the senders to predict the receiver′s wakeup time. The WSN must be applied in an efficient manner to utilize the sensor nodes and their energy to ensure effective network throughput. To ensure energy efficiency the sensors' duty cycles must be adjusted appropriately to meet the network traffic demands. The energy consumed in each node due to its switching between the active and idle states was also estimated. The sensors are assumed to be randomly deployed. This paper aims to improve the randomly deployed network lifetime by scheduling the effects of transmission, reception and sleep states on the energy consumption of the sensor nodes. Results for these states with much performance metrics were also studied and discussed.

A Study on Channel Sharing for Congestion Control in WSN MAC Protocols

Congestion control in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has been an area of interest for researchers for ensuring timely delivery of data. A number of Multi-channel MAC protocols have been proposed which guarantee parallel and collision free transmissions. This article proposes to evaluate an existing congestion control scheme that was developed for multi-channel WSN MAC protocols dealing with traffic of different priorities. The existing scheme proposed prioritized channel sharing mechanism for nodes based on the Received Signal Strength (RSS) of each priority. The authors analyze the performance of the proposed scheme by comparing it with other channel sharing mechanisms. Four cases of hybrid channel sharing mechanisms, namely complete partitioning, complete sharing, partial sharing and prioritized sharing have been studied in this work for 2 traffic priorities. The authors have modeled the schemes for WSN applications where each node may have traffic of different priorities. Major objective of the article is to facilitate the high-priority traffic, while efficiently maintaining the network utilization through reducing the number of idle channels. The analytical model has been developed using 2-dimensional Continuous Time Markov Chains (CTMC), and MATLAB has been used for the implementation. Complete sharing and Prioritized sharing are found to be the most efficient channel sharing schemes based on the network utilization and total throughput.

Delay Sensitive and Interference Aware MAC Protocol for WSN

Interference is the most important issue in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) as it causes severe degradation during communication. Also, as sensor nodes are power constraint, hence the system is expected to operate for longer duration without any delay during communication. In order to overcome these issue a delay sensitive and interference aware MAC protocol for WSN is proposed. In this paper, first MAC protocol is proposed which divides network into layer and assign node to each layer to avoid data loss in the network. Once network is divided to the multi-layer, timeslot is assigned to each node. To utilize the channel efficiently, timeslot steal mechanism is implemented. To avoid interference, a hybrid prioritization scheme is implemented to prioritize the packet queue based on weight of the packet queue and based on the idle time of the prioritized packet.

TRM-MAC: A TDMA-based reliable multicast MAC protocol for WSNs with flexibility to trade-off between latency and reliability

Multicast in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is an efficient way to deliver the same data to multiple sensor nodes. Reliable multicast in WSNs is desirable for critical tasks like code updation and query based data collection. The erroneous nature of the wireless medium coupled with limited resources of sensor nodes, makes the design of reliable multicast protocol a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a framework for reliable multicast transmission in WSNs using TDMA-based channel access which works on top of a Multicast Spanning Tree (MST) rooted at the base station. The existing TDMA-based MAC protocols do not provide any mechanism to handle the collision and explosion of feedback messages, and therefore, they cannot be used in the proposed framework to support reliable multicast. To handle this issue, we propose a TDMA-based reliable multicast MAC (TRM-MAC) protocol for WSNs. The TRM-MAC protocol is parametric in the sense that it can be used to trade-off between reliability and delay performance, as per the requirement of the underlying applications. We have analyzed the TRM-MAC protocol to evaluate its delay and reliability performance at different packet loss rates, and have also compared its performance with those of others using simulation study. Both simulation and analytical results show that the TRM-MAC protocol considerably improves the performance of multicast communication in WSNs.

Game Theory Framework for MAC Parameter Optimization in Energy-Delay Constrained Sensor Networks

Optimizing energy consumption and end-to-end (e2e) packet delay in energy-constrained, delay-sensitive wireless sensor networks is a conflicting multiobjective optimization problem. We investigate the problem from a game theory perspective, where the two optimization objectives are considered as game players. The cost model of each player is mapped through a generalized optimization framework onto protocol-specific MAC parameters. From the optimization framework, a game is first defined by the Nash bargaining solution (NBS) to assure energy consumption and e2e delay balancing. Secondy, the Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution (KSBS) is used to find an equal proportion of gain between players. Both methods offer a bargaining solution to the duty-cycle MAC protocol under different axioms. As a result, given the two performance requirements (i.e., the maximum latency tolerated by the application and the initial energy budget of nodes), the proposed framework allows to set tunable system parameters to reach a fair equilibrium point that dually minimizes the system latency and energy consumption. For illustration, this formulation is applied to six state-of-the-art wireless sensor network (WSN) MAC protocols: B-MAC, X-MAC, RI-MAC, SMAC, DMAC, and LMAC. The article shows the effectiveness and scalability of such a framework in optimizing protocol parameters that achieve a fair energy-delay performance trade-off under the application requirements.

A survey on wireless sensor networks for smart grid

The traditional power grid in many countries suffers from high maintenance costs and scalability issues along with the huge expense of building new power stations, and lack of efficient system monitoring that could increase the overall performance by acting proactively in preventing potential failures. To address these problems, a next-generation electric power system, called the smart grid (SG), has been proposed as an evolutionary system for power generation, transmission, and distribution. To this end, the SGs utilize renewable energy generation, smart meters and modern sensing and communication technologies for effective power system management, and hence, succeeding in addressing many of the requirements of a modern power grid system while significantly increase its performance. Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been recognized as a promising technology to achieve seamless, energy efficient, reliable, and low-cost remote monitoring and control in SG applications. In these systems, the required information can be provided to electric utilities by wireless sensor systems to enable them to achieve high system efficiency. The real-time information gathered from these sensors can be analyzed to diagnose problems early and serve as a basis for taking remedial action. In this paper, first WSN-based SG applications have been explored along with their technical challenges. Then, design challenges and protocol objectives have been discussed for WSN-based SG applications. After exploring applications and design challenges, communication protocols for WSN-based SG applications have been explained in detail. Here, our goal is to elaborate on the role of WSNs for smart grid applications and to provide an overview of the most recent advances in MAC and routing protocols for WSNs in this timely and exciting field.

RC-MAC: A Receiver-Centric MAC Protocol for Event-Driven Wireless Sensor Networks

Event-driven wireless sensor networks (WSNs) usually operate under light traffic load. However, when an event is detected, a large number of packets may be generated. A MAC protocol designed for this kind of WSNs should be able to swiftly adapt to the two conditions. Most WSN MAC protocols are optimized for light traffic for the energy efficiency consideration. In this paper, we propose a novel receiver-centric MAC protocol called RC-MAC that seamlessly integrates duty cycling and receiver-centric scheduling, providing high throughput without sacrificing the energy efficiency. To handle bursty traffic triggered by an event, RC-MAC takes advantage of the underlying data gathering tree structure of WSNs and the multichannel technique supported by current IEEE 802.15.4 RF transceivers to assist scheduling of medium access. The throughput is improved in two phases with receiver-centric medium access scheduling and distributed channel assignment. First, on a data gathering tree, a receiver is able to coordinate the medium access of multiple senders so as to reduce collisions and achieve high throughput. Second, different receivers coordinate their senders in different channels and the throughput is further improved by allowing parallel data gathering. Observing packet processing time on low cost sensor nodes, we design a scheduling pattern that ensures fairness between source nodes without sacrificing the throughput. We evaluate the performance of our RC-MAC through measurements of an implementation in TinyOS on TelosB motes and extensive ns-2 simulations. Compared with contention-based and scheduling-based MAC protocols, we show that the throughput and the fairness under heavy traffic load are significantly improved by the receiver-centric scheduling. Due to the high throughput, the energy efficiency is also improved.

Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks Classifications and Cross-Layering

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become a leading solution in many important applications such as intrusion detection, target tracking, industrial automation, smart building and so on. The sensor nodes are generally unattended after their deployment in hazardous, hostile or remote areas. These nodes have to work with their limited and non replenish able energy resources. Energy efficiency is one of the main design objectives for these sensor networks. Medium Access Control MAC sub-layer is part of Data Link layer in WSN's protocol stack. The energy consumption of sensor nodes is greatly affected by MAC protocol which controls the node radio functionalities. In this paper, the design requirements of energy efficient MAC protocols for WSNs are reviewed and classified. Several MAC protocols for the WSNs are described emphasizing their strength and weakness. Also, the paper introduces cross-layer protocols as a concept that leads to benefit from the network resources as well as prolonging network lifetime. The paper is appended by comparison between existing protocols regarding protocol's type, cross-layer support, and MAC scheduling. Finally, future research directions in the MAC protocol design are proposed.

A Survey on Asynchronous MAC protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor network (WSN) plays an important role in applications like surveillance, agriculture monitoring, health monitoring, industrial automation etc. Large number of low cost sensor nodes are distributed that can communicate with each other. WSN MAC protocols can be classified in to Synchronous, Asynchronous, Multiple channels and Frame based [2].Our paper focuses on the latest progresses in Asynchronous MAC protocols