MACRO: an integrated MAC/routing protocol for geographic forwarding in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Sensor networks are characterized by limited battery supplies. Due to this feature, communication protocols specifically designed for these networks should be aimed a t minimizing energy consumption. To this purpose, the sensor's capability of transmitting with different power levels can be exploited. With this in mind, in this paper an integrated MAC/Routing protocol, called MACRO, which exploits the capability of sensor devices to tune their transmission power is introduced. The proposed protocol requires that each node only knows its own coordinates and the coordinates of the destination, but does not require any exchange of location information. In order to select the next relay node, a competition is triggered at each bop, so that the most energy efficient r e b y node is chosen. This is achieved through maximization of a newly introduced parameter, called weighted progress factor, which represents the progress towards the destination per unit of transmitted power. To this aim, an analytical framework which guarantees that MACRO performs the best choice is derived. MACRO performance is evaluated through n s -2 simulation and compared to other relevant routing schemes. Performance results show that the proposed protocol outperforms other solutions in terms of energy efficiency and boosts data aggregation.

Selection of a Forwarding Area for Contention-Based Geographic Forwarding in Wireless Multi-Hop Networks

“…The size of this area depends on the transmission radius and the distance between the sender and the destination. MFA has been adopted in the GeRaF [4], the SIF [6], and the MACRO [7] protocols. 2) Maximum Communication Area (MCA).…”

“…These criteria [1] include most forward within r, 5 nearest with forward progress, compass routing, and random selection. Some nongeographic criteria such as energy [5]- [7] and link reliability can also be exploited for different optimization purposes.…”

“…To eliminate the proactive beaconing scheme, some researchers [2]- [7] have solved this problem recently using the key idea of instant access to the information regarding the neighbors and distributed selection of a next-hop node via contention. In this paper, we term such techniques as Contentionbased Geographic Forwarding (CGF).…”

The State of the Art in Cross-Layer Design for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Although the authors provide insightful results for the receiver-based routing, the impact of physical layer is not considered in the protocol operation. Similarly in [14], the routing decision is performed as a result of successive competitions at the medium access level. More specifically, the next hop is selected based on a weighted progress factor and the transmit power is increased successively until the most efficient node is found.…”

A Reliable Transmission Strategy in Unreliable Wireless Sensor Networks

“…On the other hand, Set Transfer can work with any MAC layer protocols as long as it accords with the broadcast assumption, such as IEEE 802.11, 802.15.4 and some new medium access control (MAC) protocols designed for WSN [15] [16]. It guarantees that the number of working nodes in two different transfer strategies is equal.…”