MaxMAC: A Maximally Traffic-Adaptive MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is a major concern in the design of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and their communication protocols. As the radio transceiver typically accounts for a major portion of a WSN node’s power consumption, researchers have proposed Energy-Efficient Medium Access (E2-MAC) protocols that switch the radio transceiver off for a major part of the time. Such protocols typically trade off energy-efficiency versus classical quality of service parameters (throughput, latency, reliability). Today’s E2-MAC protocols are able to deliver little amounts of data with a low energy footprint, but introduce severe restrictions with respect to throughput and latency. Regrettably, they yet fail to adapt to varying traffic load at run-time. This paper presents MaxMAC, an E2-MAC protocol that targets at achieving maximal adaptivity with respect to throughput and latency. By adaptively tuning essential parameters at run-time, the protocol reaches the throughput and latency of energy-unconstrained CSMA in high-traffic phases, while still exhibiting a high energy-efficiency in periods of sparse traffic. The paper compares the protocol against a selection of today’s E2-MAC protocols and evaluates its advantages and drawbacks.

[1]  M. Lakshmanan,et al.  AN ADAPTIVE ENERGY EFFICIENT MAC PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS , 2009 .

[2]  Majid Sarrafzadeh,et al.  The Advanced Health and Disaster Aid Network: A Light-Weight Wireless Medical System for Triage , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems.

[3]  Martina Zitterbart,et al.  Introducing probabilistic radio propagation models in OMNeT++ mobility framework and cross validation check with NS-2 , 2008, SimuTools.

[4]  Eric Anderson,et al.  X-MAC: a short preamble MAC protocol for duty-cycled wireless sensor networks , 2006, SenSys '06.

[5]  M. Ringwald,et al.  BurstMAC — An efficient MAC protocol for correlated traffic bursts , 2009, 2009 Sixth International Conference on Networked Sensing Systems (INSS).

[6]  Jan M. Rabaey,et al.  The Energy-per-Useful-Bit Metric for Evaluating and Optimizing Sensor Network Physical Layers , 2006, 2006 3rd Annual IEEE Communications Society on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks.

[7]  Ian F. Akyildiz,et al.  A survey on wireless multimedia sensor networks , 2007, Comput. Networks.

[8]  Sang Hoon Lee,et al.  AMAC: Traffic-Adaptive Sensor Network MAC Protocol through Variable Duty-Cycle Operations , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Communications.

[9]  Martina Zitterbart,et al.  Introducing probabilistic radio propagation models in OMNeT++ mobility framework and cross validation check with NS-2 , 2008, Simutools 2008.

[10]  Martin Nilsson,et al.  Investigating the energy consumption of a wireless network interface in an ad hoc networking environment , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[11]  Torsten Braun,et al.  On the adaptivity of today's Energy-Efficient MAC protocols under varying traffic conditions , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Ultra Modern Telecommunications & Workshops.

[12]  A. Varga,et al.  THE OMNET++ DISCRETE EVENT SIMULATION SYSTEM , 2003 .

[13]  David E. Culler,et al.  Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks , 2004, SenSys '04.

[14]  H. Balakrishnan,et al.  Mitigating congestion in wireless sensor networks , 2004, SenSys '04.

[15]  Matt Welsh,et al.  CodeBlue: An Ad Hoc Sensor Network Infrastructure for Emergency Medical Care , 2004 .

[16]  Amre El-Hoiydi.  ENERGY EFFICIENT MEDIUM ACCESS CONTROL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS , 2005 .

[17]  Injong Rhee,et al.  Z-MAC: a hybrid MAC for wireless sensor networks , 2005, SenSys '05.

[18]  Koen Langendoen,et al.  An adaptive energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks , 2003, SenSys '03.

[19]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  An energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks , 2002, Proceedings.Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies.

[20]  Theodore S. Rappaport,et al.  Wireless communications - principles and practice , 1996 .

[21]  Shu Du,et al.  DW-MAC: a low latency, energy efficient demand-wakeup MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks , 2008, MobiHoc '08.

[22]  Ian F. Akyildiz,et al.  Wireless multimedia sensor networks: A survey , 2007, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[23]  Amre El-Hoiydi,et al.  WiseMAC: An Ultra Low Power MAC Protocol for Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks , 2004, ALGOSENSORS.