Adaptive Duty Cycling MAC Protocols Using Closed-Loop Control for Wireless Sensor Networks

The fundamental design goal of wireless sensor MAC protocols is to minimize unnecessary power consumption of the sensor nodes, because of its stringent resource constraints and ultra-power limitation. In existing MAC protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), duty cycling, in which each node periodically cycles between the active and sleep states, has been introduced to reduce unnecessary energy consumption. Existing MAC schemes, however, use a fixed duty cycling regardless of multi-hop communication and traffic fluctuations. On the other hand, there is a tradeoff between energy efficiency and delay caused by duty cycling mechanism in multi-hop communication and existing MAC approaches only tend to improve energy efficiency with sacrificing data delivery delay. In this paper, we propose two different MAC schemes (ADS-MAC and ELA-MAC) using closed-loop control in order to achieve both energy savings and minimal delay in wireless sensor networks. The two proposed MAC schemes, which are synchronous and asynchronous approaches, respectively, utilize an adaptive timer and a successive preload frame with closed-loop control for adaptive duty cycling. As a result, the analysis and the simulation results show that our schemes outperform existing schemes in terms of energy efficiency and delivery delay

Sidelobe Control in Collaborative Beamforming via Node Selection

Collaborative beamforming (CB) is a power efficient method for data communications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) which aims at increasing the transmission range in the network by radiating the power from a cluster of sensor nodes in the directions of the intended base station(s) or access point(s) (BSs/APs). The CB average beampattern expresses a deterministic behavior and can be used for characterizing/controling the transmission at intended direction(s), since the mainlobe of the CB beampattern is independent on the particular random node locations. However, the CB for a cluster formed by a limited number of collaborative nodes results in a sample beampattern with sidelobes that severely depend on the particular node locations. High level sidelobes can cause unacceptable interference when they occur at directions of unintended BSs/APs. Therefore, sidelobe control in CB has a potential to increase the network capacity and wireless channel availability by decreasing the interference. Traditional sidelobe control techniques are proposed for centralized antenna arrays and, therefore, are not suitable for WSNs. In this paper, we show that distributed, scalable, and low-complexity sidelobe control techniques suitable for CB in WSNs can be developed based on node selection technique which make use of the randomness of the node locations. A node selection algorithm with low-rate feedback is developed to search over different node combinations. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed in terms of the average number of trials required to select the collaborative nodes and the resulting interference. Our simulation results approve the theoretical analysis and show that the interference is significantly reduced when node selection is used with CB.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, submitted to the IEEE Trans. Signal Processin

On the design of an energy-efficient low-latency integrated protocol for distributed mobile sensor networks

Self organizing, wireless sensors networks are an emergent and challenging technology that is attracting large attention in the sensing and monitoring community. Impressive progress has been done in recent years even if we need to assume that an optimal protocol for every kind of sensor network applications can not exist. As a result it is necessary to optimize the protocol for certain scenarios. In many applications for instance latency is a crucial factor in addition to energy consumption. MERLIN performs its best in such WSNs where there is the need to reduce the latency while ensuring that energy consumption is kept to a minimum. By means of that, the low latency characteristic of MERLIN can be used as a trade off to extend node lifetimes. The performance in terms of energy consumption and latency is optimized by acting on the slot length. MERLIN is designed specifically to integrate routing, MAC and localization protocols together. Furthermore it can support data queries which is a typical application for WSNs. The MERLIN protocol eliminates the necessity to have any explicit handshake mechanism among nodes. Furthermore, the reliability is improved using multiple path message propagation in combination with an overhearing mechanism. The protocol divides the network into subsets where nodes are grouped in time zones. As a result MERLIN also shows a good scalability by utilizing an appropriate scheduling mechanism in combination with a contention period

Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead

While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks

Energy-aware Dual-path Geographic Routing to Bypass Routing Holes in Wireless Sensor Networks

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this record.Geographic routing has been considered as an attractive approach for resource-constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs) since it exploits local location information instead of global topology information to route data. However, this routing approach often suffers from the routing hole (i.e., an area free of nodes in the direction closer to destination) in various environments such as buildings and obstacles during data delivery, resulting in route failure. Currently, existing geographic routing protocols tend to walk along only one side of the routing holes to recover the route, thus achieving suboptimal network performance such as longer delivery delay and lower delivery ratio. Furthermore, these protocols cannot guarantee that all packets are delivered in an energy-efficient manner once encountering routing holes. In this paper, we focus on addressing these issues and propose an energy-aware dual-path geographic routing (EDGR) protocol for better route recovery from routing holes. EDGR adaptively utilizes the location information, residual energy, and the characteristics of energy consumption to make routing decisions, and dynamically exploits two node-disjoint anchor lists, passing through two sides of the routing holes, to shift routing path for load balance. Moreover, we extend EDGR into three-dimensional (3D) sensor networks to provide energy-aware routing for routing hole detour. Simulation results demonstrate that EDGR exhibits higher energy efficiency, and has moderate performance improvements on network lifetime, packet delivery ratio, and delivery delay, compared to other geographic routing protocols in WSNs over a variety of communication scenarios passing through routing holes. The proposed EDGR is much applicable to resource-constrained WSNs with routing holes.This work has been partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61402343, No. 61672318, No. U1504614, No. 61631013, and No. 61303241), the National Key Research and Development Program (No. 2016YFB1000102), the Natural Science Foundation of Suzhou/Jiangsu Province (No. BK20160385), the EU FP7 QUICK Project (No. PIRSESGA- 2013-612652), and the projects of Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNList)