This paper proposes Isochronous-MAC (I-MAC), which utilizes low-frequency radio waves time synchronization for sensor networks. Using IMAC, based on the Low Power Listening (LPL), all sensor nodes wake and listen channel periodically and synchronously. Since a sender can easily predict wakeup time of an intended receiver, it can shorten the length of preamble to make the receiver prepare for reception of the following data packet. This saves power consumption for the sender to rendezvous with the receiver. In the paper, we use an analytical model to investigate the impact of the data transmission frequency, the number of neighboring nodes, the wakeup period, the clock drift, and the time -synchronization frequency on the power consumption for consideration of the power overhead to perform the time synchronization. Those results demonstrate that I-MAC allows determination of any arbitrary wakeup period without much difficulty, whereas LPL requires a much more careful setting of the wakeup period because its optimum wakeup period is sensitive to the frequency of data transmission as well as to the number of neighboring nodes. Therefore, IMAC has a great potential to reduce the power consumption in most situations compared with LPL, in spite of the overhead to perform time synchronization.
Network protocols for wireless sensor networks should be evaluated in terms of life time in a whole system. There exists power variation node due to the manufacturing variation. In this paper, we develop a power model, in which we consider threshold-voltage variation. We implement it to QualNet in order to evaluate the impact against a life time. The simulation results show that the conventional model has overestimated the life time longer than our model when nodes are randomly deployed. In addition, the network life time is extended by 19.3% compared with the conventional model by an optimum deployment.
We propose Isochronous-MAC (I-MAC) using the Long-Wave Standard Time Code (so called "wave clock"), and introduce crosslayer design for a low-power wireless sensor node with I-MAC. I-MAC has a periodic wakeup time synchronized with the actual time, and thus we take the wave clock. However, a frequency of a crystal oscillator varies along with temperature, which incurs a time difference among nodes. We present a time correction algorithm to address this problem, and shorten the time difference. Thereby, the preamble length in I-MAC can be minimized, which saves communication power. For further power reduction, a lowpower crystal oscillator is also proposed, as a physical-layer design. We implemented I-MAC on an off-the-shelf sensor node to estimate the power saving, and verified that the proposed cross-layer design reduces 81% of the total power, compared to Low Power Listening.
Network protocols for wireless sensor networks should be evaluated in terms of life time in a whole system. There exists power variation node due to the manufacturing variation. In this paper, we develop a power model, in which we consider threshold-voltage variation. We implement it to QualNet in order to evaluate the impact against a life time. The simulation results show that the conventional model has overestimated the life time longer than our model when nodes are randomly deployed. In addition, the network life time is extended by 19.3% compared with the conventional model by an optimum deployment.
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