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

Energy-Efficient Communication in Wireless Networks

This chapter describes the evolution of, and state of the art in, energy‐efficient techniques for wirelessly communicating networks of embedded computers, such as those found in wireless sensor network (WSN), Internet of Things (IoT) and cyberphysical systems (CPS) applications. Specifically, emphasis is placed on energy efficiency as critical to ensuring the feasibility of long lifetime, low‐maintenance and increasingly autonomous monitoring and control scenarios. A comprehensive summary of link layer and routing protocols for a variety of traffic patterns is discussed, in addition to their combination and evaluation as full protocol stacks

iQueue-MAC: A Traffic Adaptive duty-cycled MAC Protocol With Dynamic Slot Allocation

International audienceDuty-cycling technique has been widely adopted in MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks to conserve energy. However, low duty-cycle also leads to limited throughput in most of existing solutions. In this paper, we propose iQueue-MAC to provide immediate yet energy-efficient throughput enhancement for dealing with burst or heavy traffic. Combined with CSMA/CA, iQueue-MAC makes use of queue length of each sensor node and allocates suitable TDMA slots to them for packets transmission. During light traffic period, no extra slots will be allocated; iQueue-MAC acts like other low duty-cycle MACs to conserve power. While in burst or heavy traffic period, iQueue-MAC senses the build up of packet queues and dynamically schedules adequate number of slots for packet transmission. We have implemented iQueue-MAC on STM32W108 chips that offer IEEE 802.15.4 standard communication. We set up several real- world experimental scenarios, including a 46 nodes multi-hop test-bed for simulating a general application, and conducted numerous experiments to evaluate iQueue-MAC, in comparison with other traffic adaptive duty-cycle protocols, such as multi- channel version RI-MAC and CoSenS. Results clearly show that iQueue-MAC outperforms multi-channel version of RI-MAC and CoSenS in terms of packet delay and throughput