A Survey on the Evolution of Opportunistic Routing with Asynchronous Duty-Cycled MAC in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been used for environmental monitoring and reporting for many decades. Energy consumption is a significant research topic because wireless sensor nodes are battery-operated to be highly energy-constrained. Several strategies have been introduced in routing and MAC (Medium Access Control) layer protocols to facilitate energy saving. At the routing layer, an energy-efficient routing protocol, known as opportunistic routing (OR), has been designed to improve efficiency. OR achieves energy efficiency via load-balancing, which forwards packets along multiple routes over WSNs. At the MAC layer, an energy-efficient MAC protocol known as the asynchronous duty-cycled MAC (ADCM) protocol achieves energy saving by turning on and off a sensor node’s transmitter and receiver to eliminate unnecessary energy wastage. These protocols each have their own advantages and disadvantages. OR achieves energy efficiency at the routing layer but it raises an issue at the MAC layer. ADCM achieves energy efficiency at the MAC layer, but it hinders the packet forwarding efficiency of the OR. To attain better energy efficiency, a combination of these two ideas led to the development of OR with asynchronous duty-cycled MAC (OR-ADCM). However, even with better energy efficiency, limitations still exist in combining load-balancing and duty-cycling due to conflicts in the inherent properties of OR and ADCM. In this paper, we present a survey of the evolution of OR-ADCM over WSNs to help the reader better understand and appreciate the details of this tradeoff, which we hope will lead to the development of better protocol designs.

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

“…While conducting literature search for this article, numerous relevant survey articles are found. For example, a survey of MAC protocols developed for acoustic under-water networks has been presented in [15]; application specific MAC protocols have been surveyed in [16,17]; a wide array of scheduling and adaptive listening schemes deployed in MAC protocols have been surveyed in [18]; evolution of MAC protocols in terms of energy efficiency has been described in [19,20]; a survey of QoS energy efficient protocols has been presented in [21] and time-critical protocols are reviewed in [22,23]; context-aware delay tolerant protocols are reviewed in [24]; duty-cycling based protocols are discussed in [25]; protocols based on recent technique of energy harvesting have been surveyed in [26,27] and those using receiver-initiated mechanism in integration with energy harvesting have been discussed in [28]; wakeup radio based protocols are described in [29]; opportunistic routing based MAC protocols are reviewed in [30]; mobility based protocols have been surveyed in [31]; MAC protocols based on traffic prioritization mechanism have been categorized in [32]; full duplex MAC protocols have been reviewed in [33] and survey of multi-channel protocols has been presented in [34,35].…”

Low-Delay Opportunistic Routing with Reducing Overhead in Asynchronous Duty-Cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Many papers focus on effectively combing the OR and duty cycling to achieve better network performance [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. In these papers, the researchers systematically proposed the OR protocol design based on the specific asynchronous duty-cycled MAC protocol.…”

“…Bringing ( 9), (14), and ( 15) into ( 13), we get the relationship between the angle of the fan-shaped candidate area and the duty length, that is, it satisfies the proportional relationship in equation (17).…”

Prospects of Wireless Energy-Aware Sensors for Smart Factories in the Industry 4.0 Era

“…Another technique to save energy within the network is the efficient use of channel access. Therefore, the medium access control (MAC) schemes are introduced to arrange the communication from a sensor node to another node within the same network or between nodes from different networks by setting a sending time for every node [98]. Thus, the data collision problem is avoided, and the energy is saved.…”