Energy-efficiency is the main concern in most Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. For this purpose, current WSN MAC (Medium Access Control) protocols use duty-cycling schemes, where they consciously switch a node's radio between active and sleep modes. However, a node needs to be aware of (or at least use some mechanism to meet) its neighbors' sleep/active schedules, since messages cannot be exchanged unless both the transmitter and the receiver are awake. Asynchronous duty-cycling schemes have the advantage over synchronous ones to eliminating the need of clock synchronization, and to be conceptually distributed and more dynamic. However, the communicating nodes are prone to spend more time waiting for the active period of each other, which inevitably influences the one-hop delay, and consequently the cumulative end-to-end delay. This paper reviews current asynchronous WSN MAC protocols. Its main contribution is to study these protocols from the delay efficiency perspective, and to investigate on their latency. The asynchronous protocols are divided into six categories: static wake-up preamble, adaptive wake-up preamble, collaborative schedule setting, collisions resolution, receiver-initiated, and anticipation-based. Several state-of-the-art protocols are described following the proposed taxonomy, with comprehensive discussions and comparisons with respect to their latency.

Survey on Latency Issues of Asynchronous MAC Protocols in Delay-Sensitive Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents an asynchronous cascading wake-up MAC protocol for heterogeneous traffic gathering in low-power wireless sensor networks. It jointly considers energy/delay optimization and switches between two modes, according to the traffic type and delay requirements. The first mode is high duty cycle, where energy is traded-off for a reduced latency in presence of realtime traffic (RT). The second mode is low duty cycle, which is used for non-realtime traffic and gives more priority to energy saving. The proposed protocol, DuoMAC, has many features. First, it quietly adjusts the wake-up of a node according to (1) its parent's wake-up time and, (2) its estimated load. Second, it incorporates a service differentiation through an improved contention window adaptation to meet delay requirements. A comprehensive analysis is provided in the paper to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol in comparison with some state-of-the-art energy-delay efficient duty-cycled MAC protocols, namely DMAC, LL-MAC, and Diff-MAC. The network lifetime and the maximum end-to-end packet latency are adequately modeled, and numerically analyzed. The results show that LL-MAC has the best performance in terms of energy saving, while DuoMAC outperforms all the protocols in terms of delay reduction. To balance the delay/energy objectives, a runtime parameter adaptation mechanism has been integrated to DuoMAC. The mechanism relies on a constrained optimization problem with energy minimization in the objective function, constrained by the delay required for RT. The proposed protocol has been implemented on real motes using MicaZ and TinyOS. Experimental results show that the protocol clearly outperforms LL-MAC in terms of latency reduction, and more importantly, that the runtime parameter adaptation provides additional reduction of the latency while further decreasing the energy cost.

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Delay-efficient MAC protocol with traffic differentiation and run-time parameter adaptation for energy-constrained wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks is an emerging technology that serves as environment monitors in many applications. Yet these miniatures suffer from constrained resources in terms of computation capabilities and energy resources. Limited energy resource in these nodes demands an efficient consumption of that resource either by developing the modules itself or by providing an efficient communication protocols. This paper presents a comprehensive summarization and a comparative study of the available MAC protocols proposed for Wireless Sensor Networks showing their capabilities and efficiency in terms of energy consumption and delay guarantee.

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Wireless Sensor Networks:Delay Guarentee and Energy Efficient MAC Protocols

A MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol has direct impact on the energy efficiency and traffic characteristics of any Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Due to the inherent differences in WSN’s requirements and application scenarios, different kinds of MAC protocols have so far been designed especially targeted to WSNs, though the primary mode of communications is wireless like any other wireless network. This is the subject topic of this survey work to analyze various aspects of the MAC protocols proposed for WSNs. To avoid collision and ensure reliability, before any data transmission between neighboring nodes in MAC layer, sensor nodes may need sampling channel and synchronizing. Based on these needs, we categorize the major MAC protocols into three classes, analyze each protocol’s relative advantages and disadvantages, and finally present a comparative summary which could give a snapshot of the state-of-the-art to guide other researchers find appropriate areas to work on. In spite of various existing survey works, we have tried to cover all necessary aspects with the latest advancements considering the major works in this area.

https://www.ijcnis.org/index.php/ijcnis/article/download/611/139

On the Medium Access Control Protocols Suitable for Wireless Sensor Networks – A Survey

We present Duo-MAC, an asynchronous cascading wake-up scheduled MAC protocol for heterogeneous traffic forwarding in low-power wireless networks. Duo-MAC deals with energy-delay minimization problem and copes with transmission latency encountered by Today's duty-cycled protocols when forwarding heterogeneous traffic types. It switches, according to the energy and delay requirements, between Low Duty cycle (LDC) and High Duty Cycle (HDC) operating modes, and it quietly adjusts the wake-up schedule of a node according to (i) its parent's wake-up time and (ii) its estimated load, using an effective real-time signal processing linear traffic estimator. As a second contribution, Duo-MAC, proposes a service differentiation through an improved contention window adaptation algorithm to meet delay requirements of heterogeneous traffic classes. Duo-MAC's efficiency stems from balancing between the two traffic award operation modes. Implementation and experimentation of Duo-MAC on a MicaZ mote platform reveals that the protocol outperforms other state-of-the-art MAC protocols from the energy-delay minimization perspective.

Duo-MAC: Energy and time constrained data delivery MAC protocol in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, Energy efficiency is the most important performance target to prolong the networks lifetime. As the idle listening of sensor nodes result in primary energy waste, many typical MAC protocols are designed to save power by placing the radio in the low-power sleep mode, however, such schemes can lead to sleep latency problems in multi-hop transmissions. This paper analyses the sleep latency, and proposes a low- latency MAC protocol (LLMAC), which uses asynchrony message package for frame schedule between neighbor nodes instead of SYNC package in S-MAC, and brings in the stagger active schedule mechanism to maintain the data forwarding transmission. Simulation results show much better performance of the latency control compared with the existing schemes.

Huaibei Zhou

Papers

A Low-Latency MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks