LA-MAC: Low-latency asynchronous MAC for wireless sensor networks

The paper presents LA-MAC, a low-latency asynchronous access method for efficient forwarding in wireless sensor networks. It is suitable for current and future sensor networks that increasingly provide support for multiple applications, handle heterogeneous traffic, and become organized according to some complex structure (tree, DAG, partial mesh). It takes advantage of the network structure so that a parent of some nodes becomes a coordinator that schedules transmissions in a localized region. Allowing burst transmissions improves the network capacity so that the network can handle load fluctuations. At the same time, the method reduces energy consumption by decreasing the overhead of node coordination per frame. The paper reports on the results of extensive simulations that compare LA-MAC with B-MAC and X-MAC, two representative methods based on preamble sampling. They show excellent performance of LA-MAC with respect to latency, delivery ratio, and consumed energy.

[1]  Elyes Ben Hamida,et al.  DA-MAC: Density aware MAC for dynamic wireless sensor networks , 2011, 2011 IEEE 22nd International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications.

[2]  Yong Wang,et al.  Energy-efficient computing for wildlife tracking: design tradeoffs and early experiences with ZebraNet , 2002, ASPLOS X.

[3]  Katia Obraczka,et al.  Energy-efficient, application-aware medium access for sensor networks , 2005, IEEE International Conference on Mobile Adhoc and Sensor Systems Conference, 2005..

[4]  Chong-Sun Hwang,et al.  Priority-Based Medium Access Control Protocol for Providing QoS in Wireless Sensor Networks , 2007, IEICE Trans. Inf. Syst..

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

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

[7]  S. Mahlknecht,et al.  CSMA-MPS: a minimum preamble sampling MAC protocol for low power wireless sensor networks , 2004, IEEE International Workshop on Factory Communication Systems, 2004. Proceedings..

[8]  Fei Dai,et al.  Increasing network lifetime by balancing node energy consumption in heterogeneous sensor networks , 2008, Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput..

[9]  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.

[10]  Katia Obraczka,et al.  DYNAMMA: A DYNAmic Multi-channel Medium Access Framework for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks , 2007, 2007 IEEE Internatonal Conference on Mobile Adhoc and Sensor Systems.

[11]  Tim Winter,et al.  RPL: Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks , 2009 .

[12]  Alejandro P. Buchmann,et al.  Towards multi-purpose wireless sensor networks , 2005, 2005 Systems Communications (ICW'05, ICHSN'05, ICMCS'05, SENET'05).

[13]  Thomas Noël,et al.  Auto-adaptive MAC for energy-efficient burst transmissions in wireless sensor networks , 2011, 2011 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference.

[14]  Jan M. Rabaey,et al.  Power-efficient rendez-vous schemes for dense wireless sensor networks , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37577).

[15]  Suresh Singh,et al.  Exploiting heterogeneity in sensor networks , 2005, Proceedings IEEE 24th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies..

[16]  Paul J.M. Havinga,et al.  A Lightweight Medium Access Protocol (LMAC) for Wireless Sensor Networks: Reducing Preamble Transmissions and Transceiver State Switches , 2004 .

[17]  Christian C. Enz,et al.  WiseNET: an ultralow-power wireless sensor network solution , 2004, Computer.

[18]  Bhaskar Krishnamachari,et al.  An adaptive energy-efficient and low-latency MAC for data gathering in wireless sensor networks , 2004, 18th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, 2004. Proceedings..

[19]  John S. Heidemann,et al.  Ultra-low duty cycle MAC with scheduled channel polling , 2006, SenSys '06.

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

[21]  Amre El-Hoiydi,et al.  Aloha with preamble sampling for sporadic traffic in ad hoc wireless sensor networks , 2002, 2002 IEEE International Conference on Communications. Conference Proceedings. ICC 2002 (Cat. No.02CH37333).

[22]  Koen Langendoen,et al.  Energy-Efficient Medium Access Control , 2005, Embedded Systems Handbook.

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

[24]  Douglas S. J. De Couto,et al.  High-throughput routing for multi-hop wireless networks , 2004 .

[25]  Yang Liu,et al.  An energy-efficient QoS-aware media access control protocol for wireless sensor networks , 2005, IEEE International Conference on Mobile Adhoc and Sensor Systems Conference, 2005..

[26]  Alessio Vecchio,et al.  Increasing the efficiency of preamble sampling protocols for wireless sensor networks , 2006, 2006 Proceedings of the First Mobile Computing and Wireless Communication International Conference.

[27]  Fei Dai,et al.  Increasing network lifetime by balancing node energy consumption in heterogeneous sensor networks: Research Articles , 2008 .

[28]  Sung-Gi Min,et al.  Priority-based QoS MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing.