Millimeter Wave Ad Hoc Networks: Noise-limited or Interference-limited?

In millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems, narrow beam operations overcome severe channel attenuations, reduce multiuser interference, and thus introduce the new concept of noise-limited mmWave wireless networks. The regime of the network, whether noise-limited or interference-limited, heavily reflects on the medium access control (MAC) layer throughput and on proper resource allocation and interference management strategies. Yet, alternating presence of these regimes and, more importantly, their dependence on the mmWave design parameters are ignored in the current approaches to mmWave MAC layer design, with the potential disastrous consequences on the throughput/delay performance. In this paper, tractable closed-form expressions for collision probability and MAC layer throughput of mmWave networks, operating under slotted ALOHA and TDMA, are derived. The new analysis reveals that mmWave networks may exhibit a non-negligible transitional behavior from a noise-limited regime to an interference-limited regime, depending on the density of the transmitters, density and size of obstacles, transmission probability, beamwidth, and transmit power. It is concluded that a new framework of adaptive hybrid resource allocation procedure, containing a proactive contention-based phase followed by a reactive contention-free one with dynamic phase durations, is necessary to cope with such transitional behavior.Comment: accepted in IEEE GLOBECOM'1

ER-MAC: A hybrid MAC protocol for emergency response wireless sensor networks

This paper introduces ER-MAC, a hybrid MAC protocol for emergency response wireless sensor networks. ERMAC is designed as a hybrid of the TDMA and CSMA approaches, giving it the flexibility to adapt to traffic and topology changes. It adopts a TDMA approach to schedule collision-free slots. Nodes wake up for their scheduled slots, but otherwise switch into power-saving sleep mode. When an emergency occurs, nodes that participate in the emergency monitoring change their MAC behaviour by allowing contention in TDMA slots to achieve high delivery ratio and low latency. ER-MAC offers a synchronised and loose slot structure to allow nodes to join or leave the network. Simulations in ns-2 show that ERMAC outperforms Z-MAC with higher delivery ratio, lower latency, and lower energy consumption

Emergency response MAC protocol (ER-MAC) for wireless sensor networks

We introduce ER-MAC, a hybrid MAC protocol for emergency response wireless sensor networks. ER-MAC is designed as a hybrid of the TDMA and CSMA approaches, giving it the flexibility to adapt to traffic and topology changes. It adopts a TDMA approach to schedule collision-free slots. Nodes wake up for their scheduled slots, but otherwise sleep to conserve energy. When an emergency occurs, nodes that participate in the emergency monitoring change their MAC behaviour by allowing contention in TDMA slots. Simulations in ns-2 show that ER-MAC outperforms Z-MAC with higher delivery ratio, lower latency, and lower energy consumption

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

Collision-free Time Slot Reuse in Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks

To ensure a long-lived network of wireless communicating sensors, we are in need of a medium access control protocol that is able to prevent energy-wasting effects like idle listening, hidden terminal problem or collision of packets. Schedule-based medium access protocols are in general robust against these effects, but require a mechanism to establish a non-conflicting schedule. In this paper, we present such a mechanism which allows wireless sensors to choose a time interval for transmission, which is not interfering or causing collisions with other transmissions. In our solution, we do not assume any hierarchical organization in the network and all operation is localized. We empirically show that our localized algorithm is successful within a factor 2 of the minimum necessary time slots in random networks; well in range of the expected (worst case) factor 3-approximation of known first-fit algorithms. Our algorithm assures similar minimum distance between simultaneous transmissions as CSMA(/CD)-based approaches

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

PSA: The Packet Scheduling Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

The main cause of wasted energy consumption in wireless sensor networks is packet collision. The packet scheduling algorithm is therefore introduced to solve this problem. Some packet scheduling algorithms can also influence and delay the data transmitting in the real-time wireless sensor networks. This paper presents the packet scheduling algorithm (PSA) in order to reduce the packet congestion in MAC layer leading to reduce the overall of packet collision in the system The PSA is compared with the simple CSMA/CA and other approaches using network topology benchmarks in mathematical method. The performances of our PSA are better than the standard (CSMA/CA). The PSA produces better throughput than other algorithms. On other hand, the average delay of PSA is higher than previous works. However, the PSA utilizes the channel better than all algorithms