Modeling and Analyzing CSMA/CA Protocol for Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Well-designed wireless sensor networks (WSNs) usually provide vital support for collecting, processing, and forwarding the realtime information in mission-critical applications where medium access control (MAC) protocols determine the channel access control capabilities and the energy consumption properties of these networks. This paper models the MAC protocol of CSMA/CA using timed automata on the message communication and the energy harvesting and analyzes the protocol through model checking of the major CTL properties. The modeling and analysis of CSMA/CA protocol with the comparative experiments give some performance results and also reveal that timing error may cause deadlock, and the accessibility is satisfied if no deadlock exists.

A new formal approach for performance evaluation of green MAC protocol in energy harvesting WSNs

“…On the other hand, researchers have proposed some works focused on adding the new feature of sensor nodes for harvesting energy in order to discover the influence of this solution in MAC protocols. In work [15], the CSMA/CA MAC protocol in energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks is modelled and analysed based on Timed Automata (TA) [28]. The authors have proposed timed automata models of energy acquisition, message receiving and sending using CSMA/CA in EH-WSNs.…”

“…Many works have developed methods for analysing and verifying protocols in wireless networks. For this reason they have exploited several formalisms [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. Petri nets [20] are a well-suited formalism for specifying, modelling, and analysing systems with conflicts, synchronization and concurrency [21].…”