Timing is everything: the impact of wakeup schedule distribution on asynchronous power save protocols

Asynchronous power save protocols have been proposed for use in ad hoc networks. In many protocols, nodes independently follow a common periodic wakeup schedule, each with some unknown offset relative to its neighbors. The schedule is defined to ensure deterministic intervals of overlap between nodes, regardless of the distribution of the nodes' wakeup schedules. This paper studies the sensitivity of a simple asynchronous power save protocol to the actual distribution of the nodes' wakeup schedules. In practical terms: For given topology and traffic load, are there particularly "good" or "bad" distributions? We define a simplified model of network operation that allows us to study this question in simulation. The results show that the performance variation has a narrow probability distribution, but with long tails. The variation is shown to derive largely from timing dependencies rather than overall capacity of the system. The result suggests the feasibility of manipulating the wakeup schedule distribution to improve performance. Although the best wakeup distributions often mitigate the performance penalty imposed by the power save protocol, their relative rarity implies that randomized strategies will not be sufficient to obtain maximum advantage

The impact of wakeup schedule distribution in synchronous power save protocols on the performance of multihop wireless networks

By definition, the operation of an asynchronous power save protocol permits an arbitrary distribution of nodes' wakeup schedules. This wakeup schedule distribution creates an uncoordinated pattern of times at which nodes will attempt to transmit. Intuitively, we would expect that some patterns will be more (or less) favorable than others for a given traffic pattern. We investigate the impact of this wakeup pattern on network capacity and present simulation data showing that the capacity associated with the best wakeup patterns is significantly larger than that of the worst. This result not only gives insight to the behavior of such protocols, but also acts as a feasibility study showing the potential benefit of mechanisms by which nodes adapt their wakeup schedules to obtain improved performance

Talk More Listen Less: Energy-Efficient Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Sensor Networks

Neighbor discovery is a fundamental service for initialization and managing network dynamics in wireless sensor networks and mobile sensing applications. In this paper, we present a novel design principle named Talk More Listen Less (TMLL) to reduce idle-listening in neighbor discovery protocols by learning the fact that more beacons lead to fewer wakeups. We propose an extended neighbor discovery model for analyzing wakeup schedules in which beacons are not necessarily placed in the wakeup slots. Furthermore, we are the first to consider channel occupancy rate in discovery protocols by introducing a new metric to trade off among duty-cycle, latency and channel occupancy rate. Guided by the TMLL principle, we have designed Nihao, a family of energy-efficient asynchronous neighbor discovery protocols for symmetric and asymmetric cases. We compared Nihao with existing state of the art protocols via analysis and real-world testbed experiments. The result shows that Nihao significantly outperforms the others both in theory and practice.Comment: 9 pages, 14 figures, published in IEEE INFOCOM 201

Low Power, Low Delay: Opportunistic Routing meets Duty Cycling

Traditionally, routing in wireless sensor networks consists of two steps: First, the routing protocol selects a next hop, and, second, the MAC protocol waits for the intended destination to wake up and receive the data. This design makes it difficult to adapt to link dynamics and introduces delays while waiting for the next hop to wake up. In this paper we introduce ORW, a practical opportunistic routing scheme for wireless sensor networks. In a dutycycled setting, packets are addressed to sets of potential receivers and forwarded by the neighbor that wakes up first and successfully receives the packet. This reduces delay and energy consumption by utilizing all neighbors as potential forwarders. Furthermore, this increases resilience to wireless link dynamics by exploiting spatial diversity. Our results show that ORW reduces radio duty-cycles on average by 50% (up to 90% on individual nodes) and delays by 30% to 90% when compared to the state of the art

Community-based asynchronous wakeup protocol for wireless peer-to-peer file sharing networks

Ubiquitous Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking is widely expected to be manifested in a wireless environment in the near future. However, to realize such an interesting mobile computing platform, energy efficiency is one of the most critical resources management issues yet to be tackled. Unfortunately, energy efficient wireless P2P networking is still a relatively less explored topic as it is quite challenging to tackle the energy management problem without centralized control. In this paper, we meet this research challenge by proposing a new distributed protocol, called Community-Based Asynchronous Wakeup Protocol, CAWP, for energy conservation in wireless P2P file sharing networks. Simulation results show that our proposed CAWP is found to be highly effective in that it can remarkably increase the energy efficiency of the participants in a wireless P2P system. © 2005 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Let the Tree Bloom: Scalable Opportunistic Routing with ORPL

Routing in battery-operated wireless networks is challenging, posing a tradeoff between energy and latency. Previous work has shown that opportunistic routing can achieve low-latency data collection in duty-cycled networks. However, applications are now considered where nodes are not only periodic data sources, but rather addressable end points generating traffic with arbitrary patterns. We present ORPL, an opportunistic routing protocol that supports any-to-any, on-demand traffic. ORPL builds upon RPL, the standard protocol for low-power IPv6 networks. By combining RPL's tree-like topology with opportunistic routing, ORPL forwards data to any destination based on the mere knowledge of the nodes' sub-tree. We use bitmaps and Bloom filters to represent and propagate this information in a space-efficient way, making ORPL scale to large networks of addressable nodes. Our results in a 135-node testbed show that ORPL outperforms a number of state-of-the-art solutions including RPL and CTP, conciliating a sub-second latency and a sub-percent duty cycle. ORPL also increases robustness and scalability, addressing the whole network reliably through a 64-byte Bloom filter, where RPL needs kilobytes of routing tables for the same task