A Wireless Sensor MAC Protocol for Bursty Data Traffic

Abstract

This paper proposes MH-MAC, a new MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks capable of handling applications that generate infrequent huge peaks of traffic. Existing protocols are not adapted to this kind of applications. Asynchronous protocols are energy efficient for the long inactive periods, but fail to cope with the bandwidth and latency requirements of the traffic peaks when more than two nodes are sending data to a common sink. Synchronous protocols that support contention free slots provide good throughput for handling the load peaks, but consume unnecessary energy maintaining clocks synchronized for very long idle periods. MH-MAC is a multimode hybrid protocol that can be configured by the application to run in asynchronous mode or in synchronous mode, with or without contention, providing the best possible trade-off. MH-MAC is a single-hop MAC, which supports multi-hop applications through a cross-layering API. The paper includes simulation results with the energy consumption, latency and throughput for the operation modes of MH-MAC, showing the asynchronous-synchronous trade-offs and the state transition overhead.

MAC Essentials for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Many protocols such as CSMA-MPS (CSMA with Minimum Preamble Sampling) [82], TICER (Transmitted Initiated Cycled Receiver) [77], X-MAC [83], and MH-MAC (Multimod-Hybrid MAC) [84] use techniques similar to STEM-B, but with a single channel: beacons are transmitted on the same data channel. These protocols using preambles split into packets with a gap between consecutive packets have the advantage of not always requiring the full-length preamble.…”

“…MH-MAC [84] is another protocol similar to Funneling MAC allowing nodes to switch from asynchronous mode (preamble sampling) to synchronous mode (common active/wakeup schedules with contention based access) to full-on mode to adapt to varying traffic conditions. 4) Hybrid Slotted and Sampling to Reduce Preamble Cost: SCP (Scheduled Channel Polling) [79] synchronizes neighboring nodes on a common schedule like SMAC.…”

A general model for MAC protocol selection in wireless sensor networks

“…Having a central role, the sink decides on the depth of the high-traffic region with the help of Beacon message broadcasts. [47] presents a meta MAC protocol that can switch between three modes (preamble sampling, common active period, and full-on) on-demand; it provides an API for switching the mode, without offering any methods or rules on when to change protocols. Adapting various parameters of MAC protocols is also important when selecting MAC protocols.…”

DS-MAC: An energy efficient demand sleep MAC protocol with low latency for wireless sensor networks

“…In addition, CMAC protocol is not suitable for the variable data traffic. Protocols that share the similar design including CSMA-MPS (Lin et al, 2004), DPS-MAC (Dual Preamble Sampling MAC) (Lim et al, 2006), TICER (Bernardo et al, 2007), MH-MAC (Wang et al, 2007). DPS-MAC (Lim et al, 2006) and MH-MAC (Wang et al, 2007) also include timing information for broadcasting message, allowing receivers to go back to sleep and wake up at the beginning of the data transmission.…”