A Selective‐Awakening MAC Protocol for Energy‐Efficient Data Forwarding in Linear Sensor Networks

Abstract

We introduce the Selective-Awakening MAC (SA-MAC) protocol which is a synchronized duty-cycled protocol with pipelined scheduling for Linear Sensor Networks (LSNs). In the proposed protocol, nodes selectively awake depending on node density and traffic load conditions and on the state of the buffers of the receiving nodes. In order to characterize the performance of the proposed protocol, we present a Discrete-Time Markov Chain-based analysis that is validated through extensive discrete-event simulations. Our results show that SA-MAC significantly outperforms previous proposals in terms of energy consumption, throughput, and packet loss probability. This is particularly true under high node density and high traffic load conditions, which are expected to be common scenarios in the context of IoT applications. We also present an analysis by grade (i.e., the number of hops to the sink, which is located at one end of the LSN) that reveals that LSNs exhibit heterogeneous performance depending on the nodes’ grade. Such results can be used as a design guideline for future LSN implementations.

RDCPF: A Redundancy-Based Duty-Cycling Pipelined-Forwarding MAC for Linear Sensor Networks

“…Currently, lots of researchers have put their efforts into LSNs because of the widespread requirement of monitoring linear environments. For example, the authors in [ 1 ] proposed the selective-awakening MAC protocol, in which the nodes are selectively awake depending on the node density, the traffic load conditions, and the state of the buffers of the receiving nodes. Their results show that their design is energy-efficient and has low packet loss probability.…”

“…Redundant nodes in a certain grade may have to contend for the channel to send their data packets so as to avoid collision, since they tend to be located in the interference range of each other. Thus, before two nodes process a request-to-send (RTS)/clear-to-send (CTS) handshake, a contention window (CW, similar to the backoff time in [ 1 ]) is needed for contending nodes to monitor channel for potential ongoing transmission. Figure 3 manifests the detailed components of one slot when a node in grade successfully sent a data packet to a node in grade i .…”

“…The Internet of Things (IoT) has been thriving in past few decades, and its effects of linking almost every object in people’s daily lives to the Internet and augmenting items with computational power have been recognized [ 1 ]. One of the most popular research foci, and a significant technology in the IoT research area, is the wireless sensor network (WSN), which can be defined as a bunch of sensor nodes cooperating together to handle particular tasks [ 2 ].…”

Prioritized Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Wireless Sensor Networks are widely applied in various fields such as environmental monitoring, natural disaster management, management in logistics, home network management, animal management in the farm, object tracking, telematics in the transportation, and hospital patient management in the medical field. Since the data collected during environmental monitoring is collected for various purposes, quality assurance of emergency is an important consideration [1]- [3]. Also, the energy efficiency of a batteryoperated sensor affects the life of the entire network, so it must be considered [4] [3] [5].…”

“…Some studies have been conducted on how to save energy by allowing sensor nodes to turn off their radio periodically and stay in sleep whenever possible [8], [9]. Most of these findings have the effect of saving energy by increasing the listening interval and the sleep interval as much as possible but increasing the delay of the transmitted data [1], [9]. Because the existing MAC protocol was interested in only saving transmission energy, the algorithm considering the redundancy packet and priority of data took over the role by adjusting the contention window size, which has a small processing level or limits the transmission time [4], [6].…”