A Study on Channel Polling Mechanisms for the MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Most research done on the channel polling mechanisms for WSN MAC protocols has focused on achieving efficiency in terms of optimizing either delay or energy performance. This study introduces the mechanism of altering the polling interval distribution for the MAC protocol, based on the application's optimization objective (delay or energy). Two options have been considered for both packet interarrival and polling interval distributions: deterministic and exponential, and their impact on performance analysis has been studied. The packet aggregation and block acknowledgements transmission schemes have also been incorporated in the performance analysis. Simulations for energy consumption and delay have been performed using MATLAB, for various combinations of interarrival and polling interval distributions. Results show that the energy consumption improves for the exponentially distributed polling intervals, while deterministic polling intervals provide better delay performance. Changing values of traffic load and packet aggregation demonstrate the trade-off between delay and energy consumption. The impact of aggregation on the error probability and subsequently on delay and energy has also been illustrated in simulations. Finally, optimal operating parameters have been studied in order to combine delay and energy consumption as optimization criteria.

A roadmap to developing energy-efficient MAC protocol in wireless sensor networks: a case of ADP-MAC development and implementation

“…In contrast, when deterministic polling process was used for both arrival distributions, it was found that the delay reduced but the energy consumption increased; hence a trade-off between two parameters was found upon comparing deterministic and exponential polling processes. These results were published in [74] and delay plots have been shown in Fig. 3.…”

“…At this stage, the researchers should be able to identify the differences between the two sets of results and justify any differences. We performed a high-level comparison of the results published in [74] and [13] to have an insight about the differences/similarities in the expected and achieved results. The comparison showed that there was a contradiction between the expected and obtained results.…”

A Comprehensive Review on Energy Harvesting Integration in IoT Systems from MAC Layer Perspective: Challenges and Opportunities

“…Although, by increasing the time interval between two poll periods, the number of polls is decreased, and thus the network energy consumption is saved, having long time intervals between these two polling phases increases the energy wastage of the network. Hence, although this issue has been addressed in some researches [ 37 , 196 , 197 ], finding an equilibrium time interval in polling MAC protocols remains a critical issue. Token pass timing In MAC protocols which operate based on the token passing method, the controller node allocates a time interval for passing the token frame to all nodes.…”