Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC Protocol Under Light Traffic Condition in IoT Environment

In this paper, we propose analytic models for throughput and latency performance of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol operating under very low duty cycles In the Internet of Things applications. Our analytic models are intended for IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol in beacon-enabled star topology with light traffic conditions. Accuracy of the analytic models are verified through extensive simulations using the network simulator ns-2. A strong agreement between simulation results and our theoretical analysis is observed. In addition, we compare throughput and latency performance of two different CSMA/CA protocols in IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11. This is motivated by a significant discrepancy of the CSMA/CA mechanism: IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11. We observe a remarkable difference in throughput between two protocols. The simulation results also demonstrate an interesting fact that increasing the packet size will degrade the throughput of IEEE 802.15.4 due to the nature of the CSMA/CA mechanism, while a throughput improvement is usually expected

Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are penetrating our daily lives, and they are starting to be deployed even in an industrial environment. The research on such industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) considers more stringent requirements of robustness, reliability, and timeliness in each network layer. This Special Issue presents the recent research result on industrial wireless sensor networks. Each paper in this Special Issue has unique contributions in the advancements of industrial wireless sensor network research and we expect each paper to promote the relevant research and the deployment of IWSNs

A survey of IEEE 802.15.4 effective system parameters for wireless body sensor networks

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Moravejosharieh, Amirhossein, Lloret, Jaime. (2016). A survey of IEEE 802.15.4 effective system parameters for wireless body sensor networks.International Journal of Communication Systems, 29, 7, 1269-1292. DOI: 10.1002/dac.3098, which has been published in final form at http://doi.org/10.1002/dac.3098. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving[EN] Wireless body sensor networks are offered to meet the requirements of a diverse set of applications such as health-related and well-being applications. For instance, they are deployed to measure, fetch and collect human body vital signs. Such information could be further used for diagnosis and monitoring of medical conditions. IEEE 802.15.4 is arguably considered as a well-designed standard protocol to address the need for low-rate, low-power and low-cost wireless body sensor networks. Apart from the vast deployment of this technology, there are still some challenges and issues related to the performance of the medium access control (MAC) protocol of this standard that are required to be addressed. This paper comprises two main parts. In the first part, the survey has provided a thorough assessment of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol performance where its functionality is evaluated considering a range of effective system parameters, that is, some of the MAC and application parameters and the impact of mutual interference. The second part of this paper is about conducting a simulation study to determine the influence of varying values of the system parameters on IEEE 802.15.4 performance gains. More specifically, we explore the dependability level of IEEE 802.5.4 performance gains on a candidate set of system parameters. Finally, this paper highlights the tangible needs to conduct more investigations on particular aspect(s) of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Moravejosharieh, A.; Lloret, J. (2016). A survey of IEEE 802.15.4 effective system parameters for wireless body sensor networks. International Journal of Communication Systems. 29(7):1269-1292. https://doi.org/10.1002/dac.3098S12691292297Alrajeh, N. A., Lloret, J., & Canovas, A. (2014). A Framework for Obesity Control Using a Wireless Body Sensor Network. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 10(7), 534760. doi:10.1155/2014/534760Lopes I Silva B Rodrigues J Lloret J Proenca M A mobile health monitoring solution for weight control International Conference on Wireless Communications and Signal Processing (WCSP) Nanjing / China 2011 1 5Singh, N., Singh, A. K., & Singh, V. K. (2015). Design and performance of wearable ultrawide band textile antenna for medical applications. Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, 57(7), 1553-1557. doi:10.1002/mop.29131Lan, K., Chou, C.-M., Wang, T., & Li, M.-W. (2012). 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Performance Analyses and Improvements for the IEEE 802.15.4 CSMA/CA Scheme with Heterogeneous Buffered Conditions

Studies of the IEEE 802.15.4 Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) scheme have been received considerable attention recently, with most of these studies focusing on homogeneous or saturated traffic. Two novel transmission schemes—OSTS/BSTS (One Service a Time Scheme/Bulk Service a Time Scheme)—are proposed in this paper to improve the behaviors of time-critical buffered networks with heterogeneous unsaturated traffic. First, we propose a model which contains two modified semi-Markov chains and a macro-Markov chain combined with the theory of M/G/1/K queues to evaluate the characteristics of these two improved CSMA/CA schemes, in which traffic arrivals and accessing packets are bestowed with non-preemptive priority over each other, instead of prioritization. Then, throughput, packet delay and energy consumption of unsaturated, unacknowledged IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled networks are predicted based on the overall point of view which takes the dependent interactions of different types of nodes into account. Moreover, performance comparisons of these two schemes with other non-priority schemes are also proposed. Analysis and simulation results show that delay and fairness of our schemes are superior to those of other schemes, while throughput and energy efficiency are superior to others in more heterogeneous situations. Comprehensive simulations demonstrate that the analysis results of these models match well with the simulation results

Analytical model of IEEE 802.15.4 non-beacon mode with download traffic by the piggyback method

Abstract. We analyze the MAC performance of the IEEE 802.15.4 LR-WPAN non-beacon mode with the piggyback method in non-saturated condition. Our approach is to model a stochastic behavior of one device as a discrete time Markov chain. We propose an analytical model describing the download behavior of a device using piggyback method. We obtain the performance measures such as throughput, packet delay, energy consumption and packet loss probability of a device. Numerical results and simulation results show that the piggyback method which removes a backoff procedure in the backoff method can reduce the delay, loss probability and energy consumption compared with backoff method. Our results can be used to find the optimal number of devices with some constraints on packet delay and packet loss probability

Evaluation of IEEE 802.11ah Technology for Wireless Sensor Network Applications

We are entering into a new computing technological era where communications are established not just user to user, or user to machine, but also machine to machine (M2M), machine to infrastructure, machine to environment. This then brings out the idea of acquiring data from the environment, process that data and use it to obtain a benefit, and the way to make this happen is by deploying a network of sensors which will provide an application with the desired sensed data. A sensor network is for practical reasons, nowadays considered as a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). As we move from static web to social networking and furthermore to ubiquitous computing, the amount of wireless devices out there is increasing exponentially. This has triggered a series of challenges for communications technologies as many new requirements need to be addressed. Low-cost, low-power and long-range coverage are the key requirements when designing a WSN. Since the communications subsystem in a WSN is the one dragging most resources, the WSN market is demanding new communication technologies to improve the performance of their current applications, but also to empower innovation by creating new application possibilities. Consequently, a new technology proposal has emerged as a solution to the previously mentioned requirements; the IEEE 802.11ah. This is an amendment to the well-known legacy IEEE 802.11 technologies and promises coverage for up to 1km with at least 100kbps, and support a large amount of stations. This Master’s Thesis offers an insight to this new technology by evaluating its performance through an analytical model which is first developed and then evaluated in MatLab 2014b. A series of performance metrics have been considered in this work with the intention of evaluating its feasibility for WSNs. Different use cases are presented to give an idea of how this new communications standard would perform in real-life scenarios. Based on the obtained results, it is concluded that the standard would perform well when implemented in WSN. But what differentiates the IEEE 802.11ah from its close competitors is the fact that substantial infrastructure using IEEE802.11ah and its amendments already exists, for which the transition to its use seems to be an easy bet. The IEEE 802.11ah is still under development and is expected to be ready for 2016

Analysis of Energy Efficiency in IEEE 802.11ah

Recently, machine to machine (M2M) communication has been considerably evolved and occupied a large proportion of the wireless markets. The distinct feature of M2M applications brings new challenges to the design of the wireless systems. In order to increase the competence for M2M markets, several enhancements have been proposed accordingly in different wireless technologies. The thesis introduces these M2M enhancements with a focus on the Wi-Fi solution - 802.11ah technology. 802.11ah is a new amendment of Wi-Fi technology for M2M applications. In 802.11ah, a new mechanism named TIM segmentation has been introduced to provide scalable operation for a large number of devices as well as reduce the energy consumption. The scope of the thesis is to evaluate the energy efficiency of TIM segmentation in uplink traffic assuming Poisson process. To thoughtfully understand the principle of this mechanism, the fundamental MAC layer functions in Wi-Fi technologies have also been introduced. In addition, the thesis also proposed an energy-saving solution called additional sleeping (AS) cycles. The performance evaluation is based on a Matlab system-level simulator. The simulations are carried out for various TIM segmentation deployments for a selected M2M use case, the agriculture scenario. The results show that the TIM segmentation can deteriorate the performance for uplink transmission. This is because that in sporadic traffic, restricting the uplink access causes the increase in packet buffering and these packets leads to simultaneous transmission. This can be a serious issue especially for the network with a large number of devices. The random backoff procedure in Wi-Fi cannot efficiently solve this collision problem. In addition, results shows that the AS cycles can reduce the energy consumption in busy-channel sensing and also decrease the collision probability by adding extra randomness

Low overhead scheduling of LoRa transmissions for improved scalability

Recently, LoRaWAN has attracted much attention for the realization of many Internet of Things applications because it offers low-power, long-distance, and low-cost wireless communication. Recent works have shown that the LoRaWAN specification for class A devices comes with scalability limitations due to the ALOHA-like nature of the MAC layer. In this paper, we propose a synchronization and scheduling mechanism for LoRaWAN networks consisting of class A devices. The mechanism runs on top of the LoRaWAN MAC layer. A central network synchronization and scheduling entity will schedule uplink and downlink transmissions. In order to reduce the synchronization packet length, all time slots that are being assigned to an end node are encoded in a probabilistic space-efficient data structure. An end node will check if a time slot is part of the received data structure in order to determine when to transmit. Time slots are assigned based on the traffic needs of the end nodes. We show that in case of a nonsaturated multichannel LoRaWAN network with synchronization being done in a separate channel, the packet delivery ratio (PDR) is easily 7% (for SF7) to 30% (for SF12) higher than in an unsynchronized LoRaWAN network. For saturated networks, the differences in PDR become more profound as nodes are only scheduled as long as they can be accommodated given the remaining capacity of the network. The synchronization process will use less than 3-mAh extra battery capacity per end node during a one year period, for synchronization periods longer than three days. This is less than the battery capacity used to transmit packets that are going to be lost in an unsynchronized network due to collisions

Towards the efficient use of LoRa for wireless sensor networks

Since their inception in 1998 with the Smart Dust Project from University of Berkeley, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) had a tremendous impact on both science and society, influencing many (new) research fields, like Cyber-physical System (CPS), Machine to Machine (M2M), and Internet of Things (IoT). In over two decades, WSN researchers have delivered a wide-range of hardware, communication protocols, operating systems, and applications, to deal with the now classic problems of resourceconstrained devices, limited energy sources, and harsh communication environments. However, WSN research happened mostly on the same kind of hardware. With wireless communication and embedded hardware evolving, there are new opportunities to resolve the long standing issues of scaling, deploying, and maintaining a WSN. To this end, we explore in this work the most recent advances in low-power, longrange wireless communication, and the new challenges these new wireless communication techniques introduce. Specifically, we focus on the most promising such technology: LoRa. LoRa is a novel low-power, long-range communication technology, which promises a single-hop network with millions of sensor nodes. Using practical experiments, we evaluate the unique properties of LoRa, like orthogonal spreading factors, nondestructive concurrent transmissions, and carrier activity detection. Utilising these unique properties, we build a novel TDMA-style multi-hop Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol called LoRaBlink. Based on empirical results, we develop a communication model and simulator called LoRaSim to explore the scalability of a LoRa network. We conclude that, in its current deployment, LoRa cannot support the scale it is envisioned to operate at. One way to improve this scalability issue is Adaptive Data Rate (ADR). We develop two ADR protocols, Probing and Optimistic Probing, and compare them with the de facto standard ADR protocol used in the crowdsourced TTN LoRaWAN network. We demonstrate that our algorithms are much more responsive, energy efficient, and able to reach a more efficient configuration quicker, though reaching a suboptimal configuration for poor links, which is offset by the savings caused by the convergence speed. Overall, this work provides theoretical and empirical proofs that LoRa can tackle some of the long standing problems within WSN. We envision that future work, in particular on ADR and MAC protocols for LoRa and other low-power, long-range communication technologies, will help push these new communication technologies to main-stream status in WSNs