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

Comparison of CSMA based MAC protocols of wireless sensor networks

Energy conservation has been an important area of interest in Wireless Sensor networks (WSNs). Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols play an important role in energy conservation. In this paper, we describe CSMA based MAC protocols for WSN and analyze the simulation results of these protocols. We implemented S-MAC, T-MAC, B-MAC, B-MAC+, X-MAC, DMAC and Wise-MAC in TOSSIM, a simulator which unlike other simulators simulates the same code running on real hardware. Previous surveys mainly focused on the classification of MAC protocols according to the techniques being used or problem dealt with and presented a theoretical evaluation of protocols. This paper presents the comparative study of CSMA based protocols for WSNs, showing which MAC protocol is suitable in a particular environment and supports the arguments with the simulation results. The comparative study can be used to find the best suited MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks in different environments.Comment: International Journal of AdHoc Network Systems, Volume 2, Number 2, April 201

Energy-aware routing protocols in wireless sensor networks

Saving energy and increasing network lifetime are significant challenges in the field of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Energy-aware routing protocols have been introduced for WSNs to overcome limitations of WSN including limited power resources and difficulties renewing or recharging sensor nodes batteries. Furthermore, the potentially inhospitable environments of sensor locations, in some applications, such as the bottom of the ocean, or inside tornados also have to be considered. ZigBee is one of the latest communication standards designed for WSNs based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The ZigBee standard supports two routing protocols, the Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), and the cluster-tree routing protocols. These protocols are implemented to establish the network, form clusters, and transfer data between the nodes. The AODV and the cluster-tree routing protocols are two of the most efficient routing protocols in terms of reducing the control message overhead, reducing the bandwidth usage in the network, and reducing the power consumption of wireless sensor nodes compared to other routing protocols. However, neither of these protocols considers the energy level or the energy consumption rate of the wireless sensor nodes during the establishment or routing processes. (Continues...)

On the effect of combining cooperative communication with sleep mode

Cooperation is crucial in (next-generation) wireless networks as it can greatly attribute to ensuring connectivity, reliability, performance, ... Relaying looks promising in a wide variety of network types (cellular, ad-hoc on-demand), each using a certain protocol. Energy efficiency constitutes another key aspect of such networks, as battery power is often limited, and is typically achieved by sleep mode operation. As the range of applications is very broad, rather than modelling one of the protocols in detail, we construct a high-level model capturing the two essential characteristics of cooperation and energy efficiency: relaying and sleep mode, and study their interaction. The used analytical approach allows for accurate performance evaluation and enables us to unveil less trivial trade-offs and to formulate rules-of-thumb applicable across all potential scenarios

Designing energy-efficient wireless access networks: LTE and LTE-advanced

As large energy consumers, base stations need energy-efficient wireless access networks. This article compares the design of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks to energy-efficient LTE-Advanced networks. LIE-Advanced introduces three new functionalities - carrier aggregation, heterogeneous networks, and extended multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) support. The authors develop a power consumption model for LIE and LIE-Advanced macrocell and femtocell base stations, along with an energy efficiency measure. They show that LIE-Advanced's carrier aggregation and MIMO improve networks' energy efficiency up to 400 and 450 percent, respectively

A Review of Energy Conservation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, energy efficiency plays a major role to determine the lifetime of the network. The network is usually powered by a battery which is hard to recharge. Hence, one major challenge in wireless sensor networks is the issue of how to extend the lifetime of sensors to improve the efficiency. In order to reduce the rate at which the network consumes energy, researchers have come up with energy conservation techniques, schemes and protocols to solve the problem. This paper presents a brief overview of wireless sensor networks, outlines some causes of its energy loss and some energy conservation schemes based on existing techniques used in solving the problem of power management. Keywords: Wireless sensor network, Energy conservation, Duty cycling and Energy efficiency

The importance of energy efficient in wireless sensor networks

Mobile Node-based routing is an efficient routing technique compared to traditional approaches. Due to this FERP majorly data isolation is provided for sensor nodes, and the network is more energy efficient. The Mobile data collector collects data from only Family heads and forwards to the cluster head. The Node level energy saving scheme is proposed in this work. The performance of this routing protocol is assessed based on Energy consumption, Throughput, Lifetime, Packet Delivery Ratio, Energy efficiency. Most of the Energy is saved due to the introducing of mobile nodes for data collection. Apart from this, we are reducing the load for mobile data collectors also. In general, mobile data collectors have high energy resources. But it is not possible in all terrains. This FERP gives better results in military and plateaus, and irregular terrains where multihop communication is complex. This work is further enhanced by Trust node based routing to improve the lifetime of the network

Energy Efficiency in Multi-hop CDMA Networks: A Game Theoretic Analysis

A game-theoretic analysis is used to study the effects of receiver choice on the energy efficiency of multi-hop networks in which the nodes communicate using Direct-Sequence Code Division Multiple Access (DS-CDMA). A Nash equilibrium of the game in which the network nodes can choose their receivers as well as their transmit powers to maximize the total number of bits they transmit per unit of energy is derived. The energy efficiencies resulting from the use of different linear multiuser receivers in this context are compared, looking at both the non-cooperative game and the Pareto optimal solution. For analytical ease, particular attention is paid to asymptotically large networks. Significant gains in energy efficiency are observed when multiuser receivers, particularly the linear minimum mean-square error (MMSE) receiver, are used instead of conventional matched filter receivers.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the Workshop on Multi-Layer Modelling and Design of Multi-Hop Wireless Networks (MLMD 06), Minneapolis, MN, July 12 - 15, 200

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

Optimisation of routing protocols for Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) to achieve higher quality of service for real time applications

The existing routing protocols for WMNs (Wireless Mesh Networks) are extensions of protocols originally designed for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) and perform sub-optimally for the mesh connectivity of WMNs which degrades their performance in terms of increased latency in packet delivery, packet drops and decreased network throughput. The proposed research, currently at its inception, would investigate into capacity and limitations of current WMN routing protocols with respect to wireless technologies, platforms and relevant standards in context of routing requirements of identified real-time applications, namely, the disaster management and tele-health applications. The research would optimise the existing routing protocols for WMNs for the proposed applications to achieve higher quality of service, reliability and security of data access to meet their specialist requirements. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are increasingly being incorporated in disaster management solutions for access to information of disaster situation to improve effectiveness of rescue services. Currently, the routing requirements of disaster solution using WMN has been researched in context of active research project, “iSurvival- Mobile Mesh Networks for Disaster Management” , which utilises specialist applications on smart phones of end-users in the disaster area to establish WMNs using available heterogeneous wireless technologies from 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and others. These WMNs provide resilient and reconfigurable digital infrastructures, with users’ smart phones acting as routers in the connected mesh networks to facilitate routing and forwarding of information in the disaster are