A novel real-time MAC layer protocol for wireless sensor network applications

This paper presents a comparative study of existing real-time MAC layer protocols for wireless sensor networks. Then, a new real-Time MAC protocol is presented that is based on a general purpose MAC protocol, called S-MAC. While medium access strategy in S-MAC is based on contention and back-off schemes, protocol proposed in this paper uses feedback approach as a medium access strategy. As a result of this, it increases consistency in data transmission pattern, which enables it to guarantee end-to-end delay deadlines for soft realtime applications. Proposed protocol works in continuous ON mode of operation at MAC layer and is intended to be used for randomly deployed single stream wireless sensor applications. Finally, a comparative performance analysis of proposed realtime protocol is done with other real-time and general purpose MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks

Feedback based real-time MAC (RT-MAC) protocol for data packet streaming in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are generally used for event driven monitoring or periodic reporting. Once a triggering event happens, it needs to be reported in real-time as a continuous stream for some duration. In order to address such communication requirements, this thesis introduces a soft Real-Time MAC (RT-MAC) protocol for real-time data packet streaming in wireless sensor networks. RT-MAC eliminates contention for a wireless medium by introducing a feedback control packet, called Clear Channel (CC). As a result, RT-MAC has a consistent and predictable data transmission pattern that provides end-to-end delay guarantees. Additionally, RT-MAC has a lower end-to-end delay than other real-time WSN MAC protocols for two reasons: (1) it maximizes spatial channel reuse by avoiding the false blocking problem caused by request-to-send (RTS) and clear-to-send (CTS) exchanges in wireless MAC protocols (2) it reduces contention duration of control packets to facilitate faster data packet transfer. Thus, RT-MAC facilitates periodic data packet deliveries as well as alarming event reporting. RT-MAC operates both with and without duty cycle mode (sleep/wakeup schedule for sensor nodes). Duty cycle mode of RT-MAC is useful in situations where energy conservation is one of the goals along with real-time requirements. RT-MAC is well suited for multi-hop communication with a large number of hops. RT-MAC protocol supports single-stream communication between a randomly selected source and sink node pair as well as multi-stream communication among different source and sink node pairs. This thesis provides the lower and upper end-to-end delay bounds for data packets transfer in normal mode of operation of RT-MAC protocol. We used state diagram analysis to show the in-depth functioning of RT-MAC protocol. This thesis also presents Markov analysis of RT-MAC that shows the behavior of the protocol in fault scenarios. Extensive simulation results are also presented in this thesis. These results show significant improvement in delay, packet throughput performance, and uniformity in packet transmission pattern at a cost of a very small increase in energy consumption as compared to other real-time MAC protocols such as VTS and general purpose MAC protocols such as S-MAC and T-MAC

Time Segmentation Approach Allowing QoS and Energy Saving for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are conceived to monitor a certain application or physical phenomena and are supposed to function for several years without any human intervention for maintenance. Thus, the main issue in sensor networks is often to extend the lifetime of the network by reducing energy consumption. On the other hand, some applications have high priority traffic that needs to be transferred within a bounded end-to-end delay while maintaining an energy efficient behavior. We propose MaCARI, a time segmentation protocol that saves energy, improves the overall performance of the network and enables quality of service in terms of guaranteed access to the medium and end-to-end delays. This time segmentation is achieved by synchronizing the activity of nodes using a tree-based beacon propagation and allocating activity periods for each cluster of nodes. The tree-based topology is inspired from the cluster-tree proposed by the ZigBee standard. The efficiency of our protocol is proven analytically, by simulation and through real testbed measurements

Medium access control protocol design for wireless communications and networks review

Medium access control (MAC) protocol design plays a crucial role to increase the performance of wireless communications and networks. The channel access mechanism is provided by MAC layer to share the medium by multiple stations. Different types of wireless networks have different design requirements such as throughput, delay, power consumption, fairness, reliability, and network density, therefore, MAC protocol for these networks must satisfy their requirements. In this work, we proposed two multiplexing methods for modern wireless networks: Massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) and power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (PD-NOMA). The first research method namely Massive MIMO uses a massive number of antenna elements to improve both spectral efficiency and energy efficiency. On the other hand, the second research method (PD-NOMA) allows multiple non-orthogonal signals to share the same orthogonal resources by allocating different power level for each station. PD-NOMA has a better spectral efficiency over the orthogonal multiple access methods. A review of previous works regarding the MAC design for different wireless networks is classified based on different categories. The main contribution of this research work is to show the importance of the MAC design with added optimal functionalities to improve the spectral and energy efficiencies of the wireless networks

A QoS-Based Wireless Multimedia Sensor Cluster Protocol

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) provide a wireless network infrastructure for sensed data transport in environments where wired or satellite technologies cannot be used. Because the embedded hardware of the sensor nodes has been improved very much in the last years and the number of real deployments is increasing considerably, they have become a reliable option for the transmission of any type of sensed data, from few sensed measures to multimedia data. This paper proposes a new protocol that uses an ad hoc cluster based architecture which is able to adapt the logical sensor network topology to the delivered multimedia stream features, guaranteeing the quality of the communications. The proposed protocol uses the quality of service (QoS) parameters, such as bandwidth, delay, jitter, and packet loss, of each type of multimedia stream as a basis for the sensor clusters creation and organization inside the WSN, providing end-to-end QoS for each multimedia stream. We present real experiments that show the performance of the protocol for several video and audio cases when it is runningThis work has been partially supported by the "Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion," through the "Plan Nacional de I+D+i 2008-2011" in the "Subprograma de Proyectos de Investigacion Fundamental," Project TEC2011-27516. This work has also been partially supported by the Instituto de Telecomunicacoes, Next Generation Networks and Applications Group (NetGNA), Portugal, by the Government of Russian Federation, Grant 074-U01, and by National Funding from the Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) through the PEst-OE/EEI/LA0008/2013 Project.Díaz Santos, JR.; Lloret, J.; Jimenez, JM.; Rodrigues, JJPC. (2014). A QoS-Based Wireless Multimedia Sensor Cluster Protocol. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks. 2014:1-17. https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/480372S1172014Bri, D., Garcia, M., Lloret, J., & Dini, P. (2009). 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IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 7(1), 32-48. doi:10.1109/comst.2005.1423333Abbasi, A. A., & Younis, M. (2007). A survey on clustering algorithms for wireless sensor networks. Computer Communications, 30(14-15), 2826-2841. doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2007.05.024Boyinbode, O., Le, H., & Takizawa, M. (2011). A survey on clustering algorithms for wireless sensor networks. International Journal of Space-Based and Situated Computing, 1(2/3), 130. doi:10.1504/ijssc.2011.040339Ramachandran, L., Kapoor, M., Sarkar, A., & Aggarwal, A. (2000). Clustering algorithms for wireless ad hoc networks. Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on Discrete algorithms and methods for mobile computing and communications - DIALM ’00. doi:10.1145/345848.345860Chatterjee, M., Das, S. K., & Turgut, D. (2002). Cluster Computing, 5(2), 193-204. doi:10.1023/a:1013941929408Huang, Y.-M., Hsieh, M.-Y., & Wang, M.-S. (2007). 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Congestion control protocols in wireless sensor networks: A survey

The performance of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is affected by the lossy communication medium, application diversity, dense deployment, limited processing power and storage capacity, frequent topology change. All these limitations provide significant and unique design challenges to data transport control in wireless sensor networks. An effective transport protocol should consider reliable message delivery, energy-efficiency, quality of service and congestion control. The latter is vital for achieving a high throughput and a long network lifetime. Despite the huge number of protocols proposed in the literature, congestion control in WSN remains challenging. A review and taxonomy of the state-of-the-art protocols from the literature up to 2013 is provided in this paper. First, depending on the control policy, the protocols are divided into resource control vs. traffic control. Traffic control protocols are either reactive or preventive (avoiding). Reactive solutions are classified following the reaction scale, while preventive solutions are split up into buffer limitation vs. interference control. Resource control protocols are classified according to the type of resource to be tuned. © 2014 IEEE

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

A survey on network security and attack defense mechanism for wireless sensor networks.

Abstract: The severe constraints and demanding deployment environments of wireless sensor networks make security for these systems more challenging than for conventional networks. However, several properties of sensor networks may help address the challenge of building secure networks. The unique aspects of sensor networks may allow novel defenses not available in conventional networks. In this paper, we investigate the security related issues and challenges in wireless sensor networks. We identify the security threats, review proposed security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks

Implementation and evaluation of the sensornet protocol for Contiki

Sensornet Protocol (SP) is a link abstraction layer between the network layer and the link layer for sensor networks. SP was proposed as the core of a future-oriented sensor node architecture that allows flexible and optimized combination between multiple coexisting protocols. This thesis implements the SP sensornet protocol on the Contiki operating system in order to: evaluate the effectiveness of the original SP services; explore further requirements and implementation trade-offs uncovered by the original proposal. We analyze the original SP design and the TinyOS implementation of SP to design the Contiki port. We implement the data sending and receiving part of SP using Contiki processes, and the neighbor management part as a group of global routines. The evaluation consists of a single-hop traffic throughput test and a multihop convergecast test. Both tests are conducted using both simulation and experimentation. We conclude from the evaluation results that SP's link-level abstraction effectively improves modularity in protocol construction without sacrificing performance, and our SP implementation on Contiki lays a good foundation for future protocol innovations in wireless sensor networks