DGRAM: A Delay Guaranteed Routing and MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

This paper presents an integrated MAC and routing protocol called Delay Guaranteed Routing and MAC (DGRAM) for delay sensitive wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. DGRAM is a TDMA-based protocol designed to provide deterministic delay guarantee in an energy efficient manner. The design is based on slot reuse to reduce the latency of a node in accessing the medium, while ensuring contention free medium access. The transmission and reception cycles of nodes are carefully computed so that data is transported from the source towards the sink while the nodes could sleep at the other times to conserve energy. Thus, routes of data packets are integrated into DGRAM. We provide a detailed design of time slot assignment and delay analysis of the protocol. One major advantage of DGRAM over other TDMA protocols is that the slot assignment is done in a fully distributed manner making the DGRAM network self-configuring. We have simulated DGRAM using ns2 simulator and compared the results with those of SMAC for a similar network. Simulation results show that the delay experienced by data packets is always less than the analytical delay bound for which the protocol is designed. As per simulation results, the average energy consumption does not change as the event rate changes, and is less than that of SMAC. This characteristic of DGRAM provides flexibility in choosing various operating parameters without having to worry about energy efficiency.

An unequal redundancy level-based mechanism for reliable data collection in wireless sensor networks

“…It proposed a higher priority channel access and used a short frame structure to reduce the end-to-end delay. Shanti and Sahoo [27] have proposed delay guaranteed routing and MAC (DGRAM) for delay-sensitive applications in WSNs. DGRAM can provide deterministic delay guarantee and it uses slot reuse to reduce the latency.…”

“…But it is vital to calculate the transmission and reception slots of nodes accurately. Because of basing on the cross layer, the above protocols [26,27] are all difficult to implement.…”

Network-State-Aware Quality of Service Provisioning for the Internet of Things

“…A delay guaranteed routing and MC protocol (DEGRAM) [20] proposes a joint-duty cycled MAC and routing protocol, which is based on contention free TDMA. The proposal, however, suffers from the inherent TDMA based MAC synchronization problem.…”

Distributed fault tolerance for WSNs with routing tree overlays

“…If the sensor network is to be used for real time applications, the MAC protocol should provide QoS (e.g., delay) guarantee, in addition to being energy efficient. An efficiently designed TDMA-based MAC can save a lot of power compared to CSMA-based MACs, while transporting data with minimum delay as reported in [1], [2].…”

“…[2] proposes a centralized schedule such that data reaches the sink in a single TDMA frame, while keeping the length of the TDMA frame minimum, by reusing slots beyond two-hop neighbors. [1] proposes a delay-guaranteed schedule that reuses slots beyond the interference range of a node. In this protocol, routing is automatically achieved together with MAC, as only the next-hop relaying node stays awake to listen to transmitted data.…”