Modeling of Duty-Cycled MAC Protocols for Heterogeneous WSN with Priorities

[EN] Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have experienced an important revitalization, particularly with the arrival of Internet of Things applications. In a general sense, a WSN can be composed of different classes of nodes, having different characteristics or requirements (heterogeneity). Duty-cycling is a popular technique used in WSN, that allows nodes to sleep and wake up periodically in order to save energy. We believe that the modeling and performance evaluation of heterogeneous WSN with priorities operating in duty-cycling, being of capital importance for their correct design and successful deployment, have not been sufficiently explored. The present work presents a performance evaluation study of a WSN with these features. For a scenario with two classes of nodes composing the network, each with a different channel access priority, an approximate analytical model is developed with a pair of two-dimensional discrete-time Markov chains. Note that the same modeling approach can be used to analyze networks with a larger number of classes. Performance parameters such as average packet delay, throughput and average energy consumption are obtained. Analytical results are validated by simulation, showing accurate results. Furthermore, a new procedure to determine the energy consumption of nodes is proposed that significantly improves the accuracy of previous proposals. We provide quantitative evidence showing that the energy consumption accuracy improvement can be up to two orders of magnitudeThis work is part of the project PGC2018-094151-B-I00, which is financed by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades (MCIU), Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI) and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) (MCIU/AEI/FEDER.UE). C. Portillo acknowledges the funding received from the European Union under the program Erasmus Mundus Partnerships, project EuroinkaNet, GRANT AGREEMENT NUMBER -2014 -0870/001/001, and the support received from SEP-SES (DSA/103.5/15/6629)Portillo, C.; Martínez Bauset, J.; Pla, V.; Casares-Giner, V. (2020). Modeling of Duty-Cycled MAC Protocols for Heterogeneous WSN with Priorities. Electronics. 9(3):1-16. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9030467S11693Gomes, D. A., & Bianchini, D. (2016). Interconnecting Wireless Sensor Networks with the Internet Using Web Services. IEEE Latin America Transactions, 14(4), 1937-1942. doi:10.1109/tla.2016.7483537Libo, Z., Tian, H., & Chunyun, G. (2019). Wireless multimedia sensor network for rape disease detections. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, 2019(1). doi:10.1186/s13638-019-1468-3Shi, X., An, X., Zhao, Q., Liu, H., Xia, L., Sun, X., & Guo, Y. (2019). State-of-the-Art Internet of Things in Protected Agriculture. 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Proactive Energy-Efficiency: Evaluation of Duty-Cycled MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

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-cycled protocols – Sensor-MAC (SMAC), Timeout-MAC (TMAC) and TunableMAC. Although other duty-cycled protocols are reviewed, the aforementioned three protocols are observed in OMNET++ simulator via the Castalia framework. Graphical results are produced which show the energy consumption and throughput as the duty cycle is varied and the variations in results for each of the three protocols are analyzed. The results provide insight into how to ensure ‘proactive energy-efficiency’ whereby the impact of denial-of-sleep attacks can be minimized while throughput is maximized

Has time come to switch from duty-cycled MAC protocols to wake-up radio for wireless sensor networks?

Duty-cycled Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols certainly improve the energy efficiency of wireless networks. However, most of these protocols still suffer from severe degrees of overhearing and idle listening. These two issues prevent optimum energy usage, a crucial aspect in energy-constrained wireless networks such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Wake-up radio (WuR) systems drastically reduce these problems by completely switching off the nodes' microcontroller unit (MCU) and main radio transceiver until a secondary, extremely low-power receiver is triggered by a particular wireless transmission, the so called wake-up call. Unfortunately, most WuR studies focus on theoretical platforms and/or custom-built simulators. Both these factors reduce the associated usefulness of the obtained results. In this paper, we model and simulate a real, recent, and promising WuR hardware platform developed by the authors. The simulation model uses time and energy consumption values obtained in the laboratory and does not rely on custom-built simulation engines, but rather on the OMNET++ simulator. The performance of the WuR platform is compared to four of the most well-known and widely employed MAC protocols for WSN under three real-world network deployments. The paper demonstrates how the use of our WuR platform presents numerous benefits in several areas, from energy efficiency and latency to packet delivery ratio and applicability, and provides the essential information for serious consideration of switching duty-cycled MAC-based networks to WuR.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Game theory framework for MAC parameter optimization in energy-delay constrained sensor networks

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Extracting Markov Chain Models from Protocol Execution Traces for End to End Delay Evaluation in Wireless Sensor Networks

International audience—Many WSN industrial applications impose requirements in terms of end to end delay. However, the end to end delay estimation in WSNs is not a simple task because of the high dynamic of networks, the use of duty-cycled MAC protocols as well as the impact of the routing protocols. Markov-based modelling is an interesting approach to deal with this problem aiming to provide an analytical model useful for understanding protocol's behavior and to estimate the end to end delay, among other performance parameters. However, existing Markov-based analytic models abstract the reality simplifying the analysis and thus resulting models are not accurate enough for estimating the end to end delay. Furthermore, establishing an accurate Markov model using classic approaches is very difficult considering the highly dynamic behavior of the sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to obtain the Markov chain model of sensor nodes by means of Process Mining techniques through the code execution trace. End to end delay is then computed based on this Markov chain. Experimentations were done using IoT-LAB testbed platform. Comparisons in terms of delay are presented for two different metrics of the RPL protocol (hop count and ETX)

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The use of Visible Light Communication (VLC) in wake-up communication systems is a potential energy-efficient and low-cost solution for wireless communication of consumer electronics. In this paper, we go one step further and propose the use of visible light both for wake-up communication and energy harvesting purposes, with the final objective of an energy-autonomous wake-up receiver module. We first present the details and the design criteria of this novel system. We then present the results of evaluation of design criteria such as solar panel and capacitor type choices. To evaluate the performance of the developed wake-up system with energy-autonomous receiver system, we perform realistic indoor scenario tests, analyzing the effect of varying distances, angles, and light intensities as well as the effect of presence of interfering lights.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A short review on sleep scheduling mechanism in wireless sensor networks

Sleep scheduling, also known as duty cycling, which turn- s sensor nodes on and off in the necessary time, is a common train of thought to save energy. Sleep scheduling has become a significant mech- anism to prolong the lifetime of WSNs and many related methods have been proposed in recent years, which have diverse emphases and appli- cation areas. This paper classifies those methods in different taxonomies and provides a deep insight into them

Survey: energy efficient protocols using radio scheduling in wireless sensor network

An efficient energy management scheme is crucial factor for design and implementation of any sensor network. Almost all sensor networks are structured with numerous small sized, low cost sensor devices which are scattered over the large area. To improvise the network performance by high throughput with minimum energy consumption, an energy efficient radio scheduling MAC protocol is effective solution, since MAC layer has the capability to collaborate with distributed wireless networks. The present survey study provides relevant research work towards radio scheduling mechanism in the design of energy efficient wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The various radio scheduling protocols are exist in the literature, which has some limitations. Therefore, it is require developing a new energy efficient radio scheduling protocol to perform multi tasks with minimum energy consumption (e.g. data transmission). The most of research studies paying more attention towards to enhance the overall network lifetime with the aim of using energy efficient scheduling protocol. In that context, this survey study overviews the different categories of MAC based radio scheduling protocols and those protocols are measured by evaluating their data transmission capability, energy efficiency, and network performance. With the extensive analysis of existing works, many research challenges are stated. Also provides future directions for new WSN design at the end of this survey

MAC protocols with wake-up radio for wireless sensor networks: A review

The use of a low-power wake-up radio in wireless sensor networks is considered in this paper, where relevant medium access control solutions are studied. A variety of asynchronous wake-up MAC protocols have been proposed in the literature, which take advantage of integrating a second radio to the main one for waking it up. However, a complete and a comprehensive survey particularly on these protocols is missing in the literature. This paper aims at filling this gap, proposing a relevant taxonomy, and providing deep analysis and discussions. From both perspectives of energy efficiency and latency reduction, as well as their operation principles, state-of-the-art wake-up MAC protocols are grouped into three main categories: (1) duty cycled wake-up MAC protocols; (2) non-cycled wake-up protocols; and (3) path reservation wake-up protocols. The first category includes two subcategories: (1) static wake-up protocols versus (2) traffic adaptive wake-up protocols. Non-cycled wake-up MAC protocols are again divided into two classes: (1) always-on wake-up protocol and (2) radio-triggered wake-up protocols. The latter is in turn split into two subclasses: (1) passive wake-up MAC protocols versus (2) ultra low power active wake-up MAC protocols. Two schemes could be identified for the last category, (1) broadcast based wake-up versus (2) addressing based wake-up. All these classes are discussed and analyzed in this paper, and canonical protocols are investigated following the proposed taxonomy