iQueue-MAC: A traffic adaptive duty-cycled MAC protocol with dynamic slot allocation

Abstract

Duty-cycling technique has been widely adopted in MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks to conserve energy. However, low duty-cycle also leads to limited throughput in most of existing solutions. In this paper, we propose iQueue-MAC to provide immediate yet energy-efficient throughput enhancement for dealing with burst or heavy traffic. Combined with CSMA/CA, iQueue-MAC makes use of queue length of each sensor node and allocates suitable TDMA slots to them for packets transmission. During light traffic period, no extra slots will be allocated; iQueue-MAC acts like other low duty-cycle MACs to conserve power. While in burst or heavy traffic period, iQueue-MAC senses the build up of packet queues and dynamically schedules adequate number of slots for packet transmission. We have implemented iQueue-MAC on STM32W108 chips that offer IEEE 802.15.4 standard communication. We set up several realworld experimental scenarios, including a 46 nodes multi-hop test-bed for simulating a general application, and conducted numerous experiments to evaluate iQueue-MAC, in comparison with other traffic adaptive duty-cycle protocols, such as multichannel version RI-MAC and CoSenS. Results clearly show that iQueue-MAC outperforms multi-channel version of RI-MAC and CoSenS in terms of packet delay and throughput.

A QoS-aware dynamic bandwidth allocation scheme for multi-hop WiFi-based long distance networks

“…If traditional MAC protocols are used in many-to-one network topology, congestion towards the root node is inevitable. Recognizing this fact in WSN, a number of protocols such as presented in [7,8,11,[15][16][17][18] are developed. A hybrid approach using schedule-based medium access in trafficintensive regions and contention-based MAC in low traffic zones is proposed in [8,15,17].…”

“…Recognizing this fact in WSN, a number of protocols such as presented in [7,8,11,[15][16][17][18] are developed. A hybrid approach using schedule-based medium access in trafficintensive regions and contention-based MAC in low traffic zones is proposed in [8,15,17]. Z-MAC [8] acts like a contention-based protocol under low traffic conditions and a schedule-based protocol under high traffic conditions by using the schedule computed by DRAND (Distributed RAND) [19].…”

“…Each children node notifies its parent of its bandwidth demand by piggybacking this information in a routing beacon message. Making use of queue length of all the sensor nodes, iQueue-MAC [17] assigns TDMA slots of variable size for packet transmission. iQueue-MAC uses CSMA and TDMA protocols in light and high load situations respectively.…”

RIOT OS Paves the Way for Implementation of High-performance MAC Protocols

“…• to use the power of this OS to further advance our work on MAC/RDC protocols; more precisely, we are implementing other innovative MAC/RDC protocols-such as iQueue-MAC (Zhuo et al, 2013)-under RIOT, taking advantage of its high-resolution real-time features to obtain excellent performance, optimal energy consumption, and out-of-the-box portability.…”

An Optimized Approach for Time-Constrained and Reliable Bursty Data Acquisition in WMSNs

“…Therefore, BurstMAC is expected to enhance the network performance and prolong the network lifetime effectively. iQueue-MAC [11] is proposed to deal with bursty traffic by using a hybrid mechanism: CSMA/CA is used in light traffic load while TDMA is used in case of bursty traffic to provide better throughput with support of the multichannel technique. Op-LEACH [12] allows a node to utilize the unused slots of other nodes for its own bursty data transmission.…”