Elastic hybrid MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

The future is moving towards offering multiples services based on the same technology. Then, billions of sensors will be needed to satisfy the diversity of these services. Such considerable amount of connected devices must insure efficient data transmission for diverse applications. Wireless sensor network (WSN) represents the most preferred technology for the majority of applications. Researches in medium access control (MAC) mechanism have been of significant impact to the application growth because the MAC layer plays a major role in resource allocation in WSNs. We propose to enhance a MAC protocol of WSN to overcome traffic changes constraints. To achieve focused goal, we use elastic hybrid MAC scheme. The main interest of the developed MAC protocol is to design a medium access scheme that respect different quality of services (QoS) parameters needed by various established traffic. Simulation results show good improvement in measured parameters compared to typical protocol

Goodbye, ALOHA!

©2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) to interconnect and Internet-connect everyday people, objects, and machines poses new challenges in the design of wireless communication networks. The design of medium access control (MAC) protocols has been traditionally an intense area of research due to their high impact on the overall performance of wireless communications. The majority of research activities in this field deal with different variations of protocols somehow based on ALOHA, either with or without listen before talk, i.e., carrier sensing multiple access. These protocols operate well under low traffic loads and low number of simultaneous devices. However, they suffer from congestion as the traffic load and the number of devices increase. For this reason, unless revisited, the MAC layer can become a bottleneck for the success of the IoT. In this paper, we provide an overview of the existing MAC solutions for the IoT, describing current limitations and envisioned challenges for the near future. Motivated by those, we identify a family of simple algorithms based on distributed queueing (DQ), which can operate for an infinite number of devices generating any traffic load and pattern. A description of the DQ mechanism is provided and most relevant existing studies of DQ applied in different scenarios are described in this paper. In addition, we provide a novel performance evaluation of DQ when applied for the IoT. Finally, a description of the very first demo of DQ for its use in the IoT is also included in this paper.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Time Segmentation Approach Allowing QoS and Energy Saving for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are conceived to monitor a certain application or physical phenomena and are supposed to function for several years without any human intervention for maintenance. Thus, the main issue in sensor networks is often to extend the lifetime of the network by reducing energy consumption. On the other hand, some applications have high priority traffic that needs to be transferred within a bounded end-to-end delay while maintaining an energy efficient behavior. We propose MaCARI, a time segmentation protocol that saves energy, improves the overall performance of the network and enables quality of service in terms of guaranteed access to the medium and end-to-end delays. This time segmentation is achieved by synchronizing the activity of nodes using a tree-based beacon propagation and allocating activity periods for each cluster of nodes. The tree-based topology is inspired from the cluster-tree proposed by the ZigBee standard. The efficiency of our protocol is proven analytically, by simulation and through real testbed measurements

An OFDMA-based Hybrid MAC Protocol for IEEE 802.11ax

Two types of MAC mechanisms i.e., random access and reservation could be adopted for OFDMA-based wireless LANs. Reservation-based MAC is more appropriate than random access MAC for connection-oriented applications as connectionoriented applications provide strict requirements of traffic demands. On the other hand, random access mechanism is a preferred choice for bursty traffic i.e., data packets which have no fixed pattern and rate. As OFDMA-based wireless networks promise to support heterogeneous applications, researchers assume that applications with and without traffic specifications will coexist. Eventually, OFDMA-based wireless LAN will deploy hybrid MAC mechanisms inheriting traits from random access and reservation. In this article, we design a new MAC protocol which employs one kind of hybrid mechanism that will provide high throughput of data as well as maintains improved fair access policy to the medium among the terminals. The protocol works in two steps, where at step 1 sub-channels are approximately evenly distributed to the terminals and at step 2 terminals within in a subchannel will contend for medium randomly if the total number of terminals of the system is larger than the number of sub-channels. The details of the protocol is illustrated in the paper and we analyze the performance of our OFDMA-based multi-channel hybrid protocol using comprehensive computer simulations. Simulation results validate that our proposed protocol is more robust than the conventional CSMA/CA protocol in terms of throughput, collision reduction and fair access. In addition, the theoretical analysis of the saturation throughput of the protocol is also evaluated using an existing comprehensive model