EETA: An Energy Efficient Transmission Alignment for Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Energy conserving MAC protocols performing adaptive duty-cycling mechanism have been widely studied to improve the energy efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In particular, several asynchronous Low Power Listening (LPL) MAC protocols such as B-MAC, X-MAC and ContikiMAC transmit a long preamble or consecutive data packets for an efficient rendezvous between senders and receivers. However, the rendezvous results in the challenging problem of unnecessary channel utilization since the senders occupy a large portion of the medium. Furthermore, when a traffic generation time overlaps with other neighbouring nodes, they frequently encounter spatially-correlated contention incurring excessive channel contention. In this paper, we propose a novel traffic distribution scheme called an Energy Efficient Transmission Alignment (EETA), that shifts a traffic generation time of the application layer. By using a MAC layer feedback including contention information, the cross-layer framework determines whether the node delays its transmission or not. EETA is robust from the heavy contending environment due to its traffic distribution feature. We evaluate the performance of EETA through diverse experiments on the TelosB platform. The results show that EETA improves the overall energy efficiency by up to 35%, and reduces the latency by up to 48% compared to the existing scheme

Energy-efficient MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks: a survey

MAC Protocols enables sensor nodes of the same WSN to access a common shared communication channel. Many researchers have proposed different solutions explaining how to design and implement these protocols. The main goal of most MACs protocols is how to prolong lifetime of the WSN as long as possible by reducing energy consumption since it is often impossible to change or to recharge sensors’ batteries. The majority of these protocols designed for WSN are based on “duty-cycle” technique. Every node of the WSN operates on two periods: active period and sleep period to save energy. Until now (to our knowledge) there is no ideal protocol for this purpose. The main reason relies on the lack of standardization at lower layers (physical layer) and (physical) sensor hardware.  Therefore, the MAC protocol choice remains application-dependent. A useful MAC protocol should be able to adapt to network changes (topology, nodes density and network size). This paper surveys MAC protocols for WSNs and discusses the main characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of currently popular protocols

MQ-MAC: A Multi-Constrained QoS-Aware Duty Cycle MAC for Heterogeneous Traffic in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy conservation is one of the striking research issues now-a-days for power constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and hence, several duty-cycle based MAC protocols have been devised for WSNs in the last few years. However, assimilation of diverse applications with different QoS requirements (i.e., delay and reliability) within the same network also necessitates in devising a generic duty-cycle based MAC protocol that can achieve both the delay and reliability guarantee, termed as multi-constrained QoS, while preserving the energy efficiency. To address this, in this paper, we propose a Multi-constrained QoS-aware duty-cycle MAC for heterogeneous traffic in WSNs (MQ-MAC). MQ-MAC classifies the traffic based on their multi-constrained QoS demands. Through extensive simulation using ns-2 we evaluate the performance of MQ-MAC. MQ-MAC provides the desired delay and reliability guarantee according to the nature of the traffic classes as well as achieves energy efficiency