A Study of Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks

The seamless integration of low-power, miniaturised, invasive/non-invasive lightweight sensor nodes have contributed to the development of a proactive and unobtrusive Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). A WBAN provides long-term health monitoring of a patient without any constraint on his/her normal dailylife activities. This monitoring requires low-power operation of invasive/non-invasive sensor nodes. In other words, a power-efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is required to satisfy the stringent WBAN requirements including low-power consumption. In this paper, we first outline the WBAN requirements that are important for the design of a low-power MAC protocol. Then we study low-power MAC protocols proposed/investigated for WBAN with emphasis on their strengths and weaknesses. We also review different power-efficient mechanisms for WBAN. In addition, useful suggestions are given to help the MAC designers to develop a low-power MAC protocol that will satisfy the stringent WBAN requirements.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 7 table

IACR: an interference-aware channel reservation for wireless sensor networks

In battery-based wireless sensor networks, energy-efficient operation is one of the most important factors. Especially, in order to improve energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks, various studies on low power operation have been actively conducted in the MAC layer. In recent years, mutual interference among various radio technologies using the same radio frequency band has become a serious problem. Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth use the same frequency band of 2.4GHz at the same time, which causes various signal interference problems. In this paper, we propose a novel channel reservation scheme, called IACR, to improve the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks in an environment where interference occurs between various wireless technologies. The proposed scheme inserts a PN code into a long preamble for exchanging transmission status information between a transmitting node and a receiving node, thereby improving the transmission success probability while receiving less influence on transmission of other radio technologies. We performed an event-driven simulation and an experiment to measure the signal detection rate. As a result, it can be seen that the proposed technique reduces the packet drop rate by 15% and increases the discoverable distance of the control packet for channel reservation

Technical Report: Energy Evaluation of preamble Sampling MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

The paper presents a simple probabilistic analysis of the energy consumption in preamble sampling MAC protocols. We validate the analytical results with simulations. We compare the classical MAC protocols (B-MAC and X-MAC) with LAMAC, a method proposed in a companion paper. Our analysis highlights the energy savings achievable with LA-MAC with respect to B-MAC and X-MAC. It also shows that LA-MAC provides the best performance in the considered case of high density networks under traffic congestion

Link Layer Support For Unified Radio Power Management in Wireless Sensor Networks, Master\u27s Thesis, May 2007

Radio power management is of paramount concern in wireless sensor networks that must achieve long lifetimes on scarce amounts of energy. While a multitude of power management protocols have been proposed in the past, the lack of system support for flexibly integrating them with a diverse set of applications and network platforms has made them difficult to use. Instead of proposing yet another power management protocol, this thesis focuses on providing link layer support towards realizing a Unified Power Management Architecture (UPMA) for flexible radio power management in wireless sensor networks. In contrast to the monolithic approaches adopted by existing power management solutions, we provide (1) a set of standard interfaces that allow different power management protocols existing at the link layer to be easily implemented on top of common MAC level functionality, (2) an architectural framework for enabling these protocols to be easily swapped in and out depending on the needs of the applications that require them, and (3) a mechanism for coordinating the existence of multiple applications, each of which may have different requirements for the same underlying power management protocol. We have implemented these features on the Mica2 and Telosb radio stacks in TinyOS-2.0. Microbenchmark results demonstrate that the separation of power management from MAC level functionality incurs a negligible decrease in performance when compared to existing monolithic implementations. Two case studies show that the power management requirements of multiple applications can be easily coordinated, sometimes even resulting in better power savings than any one of them can achieve individually

Receiver-Initiated Handshaking MAC Based On Traffic Estimation for Underwater Sensor Networks

In underwater sensor networks (UWSNs), the unique characteristics of acoustic channels have posed great challenges for the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols. The long propagation delay problem has been widely explored in recent literature. However, the long preamble problem with acoustic modems revealed in real experiments brings new challenges to underwater MAC design. The overhead of control messages in handshaking-based protocols becomes significant due to the long preamble in underwater acoustic modems. To address this problem, we advocate the receiver-initiated handshaking method with parallel reservation to improve the handshaking efficiency. Despite some existing works along this direction, the data polling problem is still an open issue. Without knowing the status of senders, the receiver faces two challenges for efficient data polling: when to poll data from the sender and how much data to request. In this paper, we propose a traffic estimation-based receiver-initiated MAC (TERI-MAC) to solve this problem with an adaptive approach. Data polling in TERI-MAC depends on an online approximation of traffic distribution. It estimates the energy efficiency and network latency and starts the data request only when the preferred performance can be achieved. TERI-MAC can achieve a stable energy efficiency with arbitrary network traffic patterns. For traffic estimation, we employ a resampling technique to keep a small computation and memory overhead. The performance of TERI-MAC in terms of energy efficiency, channel utilization, and communication latency is verified in simulations. Our results show that, compared with existing receiver-initiated-based underwater MAC protocols, TERI-MAC can achieve higher energy efficiency at the price of a delay penalty. This confirms the strength of TERI-MAC for delay-tolerant applications

Receiver-Initiated Handshaking MAC Based on Traffic Estimation for Underwater Sensor Networks

In underwater sensor networks (UWSNs), the unique characteristics of acoustic channels have posed great challenges for the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols. The long propagation delay problem has been widely explored in recent literature. However,the long preamble problem with acoustic modems revealed in real experiments brings new challenges to underwater MAC design. The overhead of control messages in handshaking-based protocols becomes significant due to the long preamble in underwater acoustic modems. To address this problem, we advocate the receiver-initiated handshaking method with parallel reservation to improve the handshaking efficiency. Despite some existing works along this direction, the data polling problem is still an open issue. Without knowing the status of senders, the receiver faces two challenges for efficient data polling: when to poll data from the sender and how much data to request. In this paper, we propose a traffic estimation-basedreceiver-initiated MAC(TERI-MAC)to solve this problem with an adaptive approach. Data polling in TERI-MAC depends on an online approximation of traffic distribution. It estimates the energy efficiency and network latency and starts the data request only when the preferred performance can be achieved. TERI-MAC can achieve a stable energy efficiency with arbitrary network traffic patterns. For traffic estimation, we employ a resampling technique to keep a small computation and memory overhead. The performance of TERI-MAC in terms of energy efficiency, channel utilization, and communication latency is verified in simulations. Our results show that, compared with existing receiver-initiated-based underwater MAC protocols, TERI-MAC can achieve higher energy efficiency at the price of a delay penalty. This confirms the strength of TERI-MAC for delay-tolerant applications

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper