DPS-MAC: An Asynchronous MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks
Asynchronous power efficient communication protocols are crucial to the success of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) as a distributed computing paradigm. This paper presents an improved asynchronous duty-cycled MAC protocol for WSN. It adopts a novel dual p
- PDF / 330,678 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 430 x 660 pts Page_size
- 19 Downloads / 254 Views
University of Illinois at Chicago, USA {hwang10,xzhang20,ashfaq}@uic.edu 2 University of Lille – INRIA, France [email protected]
Abstract. Asynchronous power efficient communication protocols are crucial to the success of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) as a distributed computing paradigm. This paper presents an improved asynchronous duty-cycled MAC protocol for WSN. It adopts a novel dual preamble sampling (DPS) approach by combining low power listening (LPL) with short strobed preambles to significantly reduce idle listening in existing protocols. In our ns-2 based experiments, the performance of the proposed solution is compared with B-MAC and X-MAC, two most recent and popular asynchronous MAC protocols for WSNs. Depending on the traffic load and preamble length, the proposed DPS-MAC improves energy consumption significantly compared to X-MAC without degrading other network performances such as delivery ratio and latency. For example for the traffic rate of 0.1 packets/s and preamble length of 0.1s, the average improvement in energy consumption compared to X-MAC is about 154%. Keywords: Energy efficiency, MAC protocol, Wireless sensor network, Duty cycle, Low-power listening, Short strobed preamble, Dual preamble sampling.
1 Introduction Energy consumption is critical to the lifetime of wireless sensor network (WSN) applications because of the energy constraint in sensor nodes. The low traffic load in WSN applications makes it possible to explore low power designs for the communication protocols. In WSN, radio is the major source of energy consumption, which is used either for regular network functions like data transmission or for implicit operations such as idle listening and overhearing [4]. These implicit radio operations are generally employed by the medium access control (MAC) protocol to guarantee fair channel access for each node, and hence MAC layer is undoubtedly one of the fundamental layers in which low power protocol design is adopted to avoid unnecessary energy waste. Existing protocols are broadly classified into two categories: contention-based [4,5,6,7,8,9] and contention-free protocols [13,14]. Contention-free protocols, while being highly energy efficient, require tight synchronization among nodes and thus are less popular and scalable fo dynamic traffic or mobile WSN applications. This paper deals with the design of energy efficient contention-based asynchronous protocols for WSNs. In designing such asynchronous MAC protocols the prevailing method to reduce energy consumption is duty cycling, in which nodes wake up for a short period in each S. Aluru et al. (Eds.): HiPC 2007, LNCS 4873, pp. 393–404, 2007. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
394
H. Wang et al.
cycle to listen the channel for any potential communication. If the channel is found busy, nodes prepare to receive data otherwise they switch themselves off to sleep. This mechanism reduces idle-listening significantly, which has been identified as the main energy waste in WSNs. However, for accurate functioning of the communicat
Data Loading...
