Survey wireless sensor network MAC protocols

Anton Bilos
Technical University of Eindhoven Eindhoven, The Netherlands

David Hardy
Technical University of Eindhoven Eindhoven, The Netherlands

ABSTRACT
In this paper we look into various MAC protocols and give a short explanation about their function. We compare these MAC protocols and explain the advantages/disadvantages of various power reduction schemes. We conclude by categorizing the MAC protocols to various applications.

What inuence has power consumption on the choice of a MAC protocol? To save power there are several options, like clustering and sleep times for nodes. What are the disadvantages of these power saving options? What MAC protocols are suitable for what applications? We start out by presenting the classication of the MAC protocols we have treated, each class is highlighted by its properties and how it is built up. The classes for the MAC protocols are: Contention based protocols: These protocols have no notion of time and it uses the medium when it is available. Time based protocols: Assignment of the medium is done by timing, hence, time based protocols. Hybrid: A few protocols combine parts of both protocols. We then treat a few MAC protocols, describe their function and add our own analysis to the protocol. We treat what power saving options have been implemented and its inuence on other parameters. In the conclusion we compare these various classes and see how they perform with respect to power usage and power eciency. We will treat advantages and disadvantages of the protocols and see how that maps on various applications.

General Terms
Survey MAC protocols

1.

INTRODUCTION

Wireless sensor networks is a fast developing eld that has lead to the proliferation of various protocols. In this paper we will look primarily at MAC protocols that manages how the wireless communication is handled. But what are MAC protocols? MAC stands for Media Access Control, where in the case of wireless sensor networks the media stands for the wireless frequency band. There is specialized control needed to control access to this medium to ensure correct operation. There are a few general aspects that all MAC protocols (try) to address: Collisions, two transmitters sending at the same time and corrupting the transmission. Overhearing avoidance, preventing overhearing of messages not meant for you. Fairness, all participants in the network get their share of bandwidth without degrading the performance of others. Power eciency. Our focus is on energy usage and conservation as wireless sensor networks are usually battery operated or extract energy from their environment. Our research questions are:

2.

MAC PROTOCOL CLASSIFICATION

Before we can start by treating various MAC protocols we rst create a classication of these protocols. There are two main classes and a third hybrid class. The classication is made on the method the protocols use when accessing the wireless medium. This distinction splits the protocols in two camps, contention based protocols and timing based protocols.

2.1

Contention protocols

The Contention based protocols are protocols that deal with the medium on a rst rst serve basis. There are various

methods and schemes that are used in determining or optimizing the medium access to ensure fairness and reducing collisions. This method is vulnerable to collisions in general and there are various schemes used to prevent these collisions and wasting bandwidth and reducing errors. PAMAS and IEEE802.11 are the primary example for contention based protocols. PAMAS is treated in section 5 as it is one of the more heavily cited protocols in literature and 802.11 is treated in section 4 used a lot in experimental comparisons with various protocols. We will treat both protocols in depth. As we will see especially for this protocols in combination with sleep it is hard to determine when to wake up, since sleeping is in the time domain and the communication is not.

monitoring station. We speak of only one sink, but multiple sinks are possible. One example is the implementation described in Paek et al [1]. This application has some requirements with respect to the MAC protocol. The nodes are generally not replaceable so in general lifetime is the most important aspect.

3.2

Dynamic monitoring

2.2

Timing protocols

In dynamic monitoring the assumption is made that we have a network where the nodes do move around and they monitor their environment. This application is used in monitoring mobile units like equipment or animals. Monitoring a eld of cows is one possible application. Cows have nodes attached to their legs to monitor step rates. The cows move trough the eld and in and out of the stable when they want thus changing the topology of the network. A wireless sensor network ts well in this application as it reduces periodic checkups on the cows and when something is wrong it can be detected right away. This application has some requirements with respect to the MAC protocol. Nodes are replaceable but a long run time is expected, you can not expect the farmer replacing nodes every day on cow legs. The dynamic network introduces many complexities in the MAC protocol.

The timing based protocols use periods to determine medium access where in each period there is exactly one transmitter, and one or multiple receivers. The activation times of receiver and transmitter is governed by a schedule that is repeated periodically. This schedule can be modied during usage of the network depending on external events or a given time period. Example protocols we choose are TRAMA, which is handled in section 8 and ER-MAC treated in section 7. These protocols usually have a long (contention based) initialization phase, in which the schedules are made. Once these schedules are complete sleeping of nodes is relative easy.

2.3

Hybrid protocols 3.3 Dynamic tracking

In dynamic tracking the network is mobile but instead of monitoring the environment it tracks the nodes to track movement. This is also known under the concept of active RFID. Tracking visitors in a conference/fair is one application. Visitors to a conference are given a badge with a unique number attached to their name and a button to signal that the visitor has seen something interesting. The visitors move trough the terrain and each patch of terrain is monitored by a base station. This base station monitors what nodes are nearby and records this data with a time stamp. For a practical implementation see the openbeacon.org project [3]. This application has some requirements with respect to the MAC protocol. Nodes are usually replaceable, or have replaceable batteries. Power optimization is important as you do not want to replace the batteries or tags every few months. The protocol is usually centered around access points or base stations that collect data sent by the nodes.

The hybrid protocols combine various aspects of time and contention based protocols to x or at least reduce the disadvantages of each protocol. As there are many possible hybrid mixes of protocols there are large amount of possible MAC protocols, we chose S-MAC which is explained in section 6.

3.

TAXONOMY OF APPLICATIONS

As there are three groups of MAC protocols there are also a few groups of applications possible. This makes it easy to see what protocols are suitable for each application. Static monitoring Dynamic monitoring Dynamic tracking

3.1

Static monitoring

In static monitoring the assumption is made that we have a network where the nodes do not move and they monitor their environment. This application is used in monitoring various large objects where it would be impractical or infeasible to monitor the object by people. Monitoring a bridge is one such example, this is a very large object with many hard to access locations. Sending out people to monitor various parts of the bridge is expensive and requires dedicated expertise. A wireless sensor network is a ideal replacement, the nodes can monitor various aspects of the bridge with sensors and report back to the primary

4.

IEEE 802.11 BASED MAC

The IEEE 802.11 MAC for wireless networking is widely used for wireless networking in a home and business computing environment. Many studies and experiments compare their protocol other wireless sensor network MACs but also use 802.11 networking as a baseline. The 802.11 MAC protocol is not optimized for power optimization but more on throughput and bandwidth eciency.

4.1

Operation

The IEEE 802.11 standard is optimized for wireless networking applications and not for wireless sensor networks. Therefor most of its specialized features are centered in preventing bandwidth waste and improving utilization.

4.1.1

Collision avoidance

The 802.11 MAC protocol uses RTS/CTS pairs in achieving collision avoidance, a RTS is sent to the node that is the end point for the data. The node itself transmits a CTS to the sender of the RTS. All the other nodes in range of the transmitters of the CTS and RTS receive a RTS and/or CTS and refrain from transmitting until the transmission is over. This is the basic protocol behind the CSMA/CA scheme (for a more thorough explanation see [6]). The transmission also holds a duration eld that describes how long this transmission takes. This way other nodes know when the medium becomes available. This is done as the transceivers in 802.11 can not detect when a collision occurs so a virtual carrier sense is created. This scheme is also called the Network Allocation Vector (for more information see [8]).

As soon as node A sends the RTS it goes into the Await CTS state. When node B sends the CTS node B goes to the Await Packet State. If for some reason the CTS is not received by node A it will go to the Binary Exponential Backoff (BEB) state after 1 time step and it will resend a RTS after a random time. If CTS is not received by node A, then node B will leave the Await Packet Sate after 1 time step and return to Idle state. When the CTS is received by node A it will go to the Transmit Packet state, ignoring all communication on the signalling channel and sending data on the data channel. When node B starts receiving data it will go to the Receive Packet state and will send out a busy tone on the signalling channel, so that other nodes know that node B is receiving data on the data channel (this to avoid collisions). When the transmission is complete both nodes will return to the idle state. This busy tone is send in such a period that a RTS or a CTS cannot be send completely, so it will always collide, thus preventing additional nodes sending over the data channel. During the states Await Packet, Await CTS and BEB, nodes can still receive a (new) RTS and go to the Await Packet by replying with a CTS. If a node is sending a busy tone no other nodes that receive this busy tone communicate over the data channel to avoid collisions. When a collision occurs on the signalling channel, for example two nodes try to send a RTS, both nodes will enter the BEB state after 1 time step and will try again a random time later.

4.2

Design

This protocol assumes that there are base stations called access points. They provide arbitration and clustering of the various nodes.

4.3

Results

We have only included 802.11 for completeness, most MACs for wireless sensor networks compare 802.11 with their own MAC, so will not show any experimental results.

5.1.2

Power off

5.

PAMAS PROTOCOL

The Power Aware Multi-Access protocol with Signalling (PAMAS) MAC is one of the basic MACs of which many other MAC continued from. It is created by Suresh Singh et al [5].

To extend the lifetime of a node powering o the radio is important. But this should be done with care. PAMAS has two rules to power o the radio: 1. A node has no data to send and a neighbor is transmitting (to another node). 2. A neighbor is receiving, even if the node itself has data to send. The second rule is the easiest to explain. The receiving node occupies the signalling channel with its busy tone. Therefore the rst node cannot receive any RTS or CTS and thus cannot do anything. The rst rule is less obvious, because a node should only power down if it has no data to send. When it has no data and a neighbor is transmitting the node cannot receive anything without collision, because the transmitting node occupies the data channel. But when a node wants to send data and no neighbors are receiving, the signalling channel is free and the data channel has no collision at the intended receiver side. This because the intended receiver and the sending neighbor node cannot see each other. The collsion that occurs at both senders does not matter, because they are not receivers. This powering down scheme does not prevent idle listening. When a node is powered down and another node tries to send a RTS no errors will occur. Because to the sending node it just looks like an collision occurred and the node will enter the BEB state. To know how long a node should stay powered o is handled by the Probe Protocol.

5.1

Operation

This protocol tries to minimize power usage, by letting nodes sleep as much as possible. To do so it relies on the following mechanisms. PAMAS State machine. Power o scheme. Probe Protocol. Also we discus an alternative for the Probe Protocol.

5.1.1

PAMAS State machine

To be able to use PAMAS the nodes need to have two separate channels. One is used for data trac, the other is used for signalling. As can be seen in Figure 1 there are 6 dierent states a node can be at. Initially a node is in the Idle state. With use of CTS and RTS, which are communicated over the signalling channel, a note can communicate. When node B receives an RTS from node A (assuming that currently there are no other nodes communicating), node B will reply with a CTS.

Figure 1: The PAMAS State Machine, Suresh Singh et al [5]

5.1.3

Probe Protocol

To know how long a node must power itself down it uses the Probe Protocol. When a node decides to power down it does so because there is a transmission which does not require the node to be active. From this transmission the node can determine how long this transmission is going to last. This information is either in the data header (rst packet), or in the busy tone. So the node powers down for this duration. When the node is powered up again there is a possibility that another node started sending while it was asleep. Now the node has missed the header and there is a possibility that it hears no busy tone, so the node does not know how long it should power down. Now the node will send a probe packet over the signalling channels. Node which hear this probe packet respond with a probe response. This contains the duration for the ongoing transmission, so the node knows for how long it can sleep. When it does not hear a reply, a node will try to send a probe packet again.

tention based protocols). The only thing that PAMAS needs are two separate radios and that nodes can communicate bidirectional, so base stations that can send to all nodes are not supported by PAMAS. Also no clock synchronization is needed because times is only used for waking up and this is relative time.

5.3

Results

5.1.4

Alternative for the Probe Protocol

The PAMAS protocol only has results based on simulations, taken from the paper of Suresh Singh et al [5]. For the simulation the following settings were used: The packet size is 512 bytes, the CTS and RTS 32 bytes each. The busy tone lasts twice as long as the sending of 1 CTS/RTS. The bandwidth is 12.8Kbps. Sending 32 bytes or receiving 64 bytes takes 1 unit of energy. Other operations cost no energy. Nodes can buer 2n messages, were n is the number of nodes. To measure power saving the amount of bytes send and received were calculated, as well as the total numbers of packets send. Nodes generate packets by a poisson process and determine there destination uniformly. Messages are routed via the shortest path. Depending on the structure of the network dierent improvements were measured. For a fully connected network at low loads a gain of more then 50% was found, in power saving. For higher loads it converges to 50% (see Figure 2). In networks which have more of a line structure (Figure 3) a lower improvement was measured. At low loads only 20% was measured and higher loads converge to 10%. This difference in respect to a fully connected network is because now more transmission can be executed in parallel. Nodes

Normally we assume that a node shuts down both channels. But if instead the node does not disable the signalling channel it can still overhear the transmission durations which are send.

5.2

Design

PAMAS does not solve routing, so the application has to provide for this. Because PAMAS does not have routing it is exible in use in respect to dynamic nodes (as most con-

Figure 2: Power saved in a fully connected network, Suresh Singh et al [5]

Figure 3: Power saved in a line network, Suresh Singh et al [5] 1. The node listens for a certain amount of time, when it does not hear a schedule from another node it chooses a random time to go to sleep and broadcasts its schedule. A node that has no own schedule but broadcasts its own schedule is known as a synchronizer because it chooses its own schedule and other nodes will synchronize with it. 2. If the node receives a schedule before it chooses its own it will follow this schedule by setting his own schedule to the received schedule. Such a node is called a follower. As the nodes copy schedules from other nodes the whole network have usually the same schedule or islands that may have the same schedule. The method of listening and sleeping periodically requires periodic updates with neighboring nodes because of clock inaccuracies. This is done by periodically sending out synchronization packets to rebroadcast the schedule.

in the far left can independently communicate form nodes at the far right. The third setup is a random distributed network. Figure 4 shows that the more connected the network becomes, the more power is saved. Because when a node is connected to more other nodes, it more frequently overhears transmissions and will go to sleep.

6.

S-MAC PROTOCOL

The S-MAC protocol (Short for Sensor MAC) is a protocol specically designed for usage in Wireless sensor networks and is designed by Wei Ye et al [9].

6.1

Operation

The S-MAC protocol focuses a lot on keeping on air time of the transceiver to a minimum. It accomplishes this in various ways: Scheduling. Collision avoidance. Overhearing avoidance. Message passing.

6.1.2

Collision Avoidance

6.1.1

Scheduling

The S-MAC protocol uses periodic listening en sleeping to keep the transceiver and processor sleeping as much as possible, thus conserving power. Each node creates its own schedule and communicates this to other nodes so they know when the node is active. These schedules are resend from time to time to account for clock drift with the network nodes. Before nodes start with their schedule a discovery phase is initiated to discover the other nodes schedules. This is done by the following phases.

The S-MAC protocol uses the RTS/CTS system to realize collision avoidance. Each transmitted packet has a additional eld that indicates how long the transmission will take. This way nodes that overhear the packets know how long the transmission is going to take, this is updated in a internal counter. This way the overhearing node knows when and how long the medium is going to be busy.

6.1.3

Overhearing avoidance

This continual listening to data and RTS/CTS used in collision avoidance is not energy ecient. In wireless sensor networks receiving data only consumes a bit less power then transmitting. In S-MAC overhearing avoidance is accomplished by letting nodes go to sleep when a RTS or CTS

A Source 1 C

E Sink 2

B Source 2

D Sink 1

Figure 5: S-MAC experiment setup, Wei Ye et al. [9]

6.3

Results

The paper of Wei Ye et al [9] also has in eld measurement results of the S-MAC protocol. Figure 4: Power saved in a random network with 10 nodes, Suresh Singh et al [5] packets is received. Each node maintains the counter that indicates how long the medium is going to be busy.

6.3.1

Platform

The hardware platform used in the experiments are the Rene Motes. These nodes consist of a AT90LS8535 microcontroller from atmel with 8KiB ash and 0.5KiB RAM. The radio transceiver is the TR1000 from RF Monolithics, Inc.

6.1.4

Message passing

6.3.2

Experiment Setup

S-MAC has ecient methods in passing large messages around in the network. Large messages that are transmitted as one large packet are inecient as this also has a higher probability of failure in noisy environments. If packets are fragmented the chances of failure are smaller, but this increases the overhead as each packet needs a RTS CTS packet. SMAC works around this by sending bursts of data using only one RTS CTS pair. Each data packet received is acknowledged by the receiver and if not received is retransmitted immediately. The reason to acknowledge each data packet is to prevent the hidden terminal problem (See [7]). It is possible that a new node comes online or into range and might disrupt the current transmission. The new node overhears the transmission in progress, by the data packets if its in range of the transmitter or the ACK packets if it is in range of the receiver. This way the node knows that a transmission is in progress and will remain silent. The transmitter and receiver pair may extend the transmission time due to errors. Nodes that wake up expecting a clear medium will detect this condition of time extension by detecting the acknowledges or data fragments (these both contain duration information).

The software running on the platform is TinyOS with a few adaptations to implement S-MAC. They implemented three protocol types on these nodes: Simplied IEEE 802.11 DCF Message passing with overhearing avoidance The complete S-MAC The IEEE 802.11 DCF has support for: physical and virtual carrier sense, back o and retry, RTS/CTS/DATA/ACK packet exchange and fragmentation support. The experimental setup consists of simple network of ve nodes. This small network is sucient to show the basic characteristics of the protocols and their performance, see Figure 5. Data is transmitted from sources to sinks and various performance metrics are recorded like power consumption and latency. The arrival time of data is varied to show the advantage of the sleep schedules.

6.2

Design

6.3.3

Numbers and Analysis

The S-MAC protocol deals only with node to node communications and does not have any routing provisions. The network is strictly ad-hoc and there is no mention of using base stations or access points in the network. The requirements of the hardware for the S-MAC protocol is a transceiver and a reasonable accurate clock (not more then a few ms jitter/inaccuracy). The clock is needed for internal timekeeping and to determine when to wake up from sleep after a time period has expired.

Figure 6 shows the power consumption of the three protocols under various loads of the network. S-MAC has a distinct advantage under higher load conditions and saves power with overhearing avoidance and ecient transmission of long data packets. At lighter loads the S-MAC advantage continues to grow as idle listening rarely happens while in with IEEE 802.11 the receiver is operated continually. At light loads the periodic sleep starts to pay o and shows the scalability of the protocol.

usage. Each node knows the TDMA schedule of all its local nodes and thus can transmit and receive to each node that wants to send or receive data. Another property of using TDMA slotting of the medium is that no contention issues occur as all the nodes in the network get their fair share of bandwidth. The leaders have more energy to consume so are allocated more TDMA slots to use this energy.

7.1.2

Power awareness

Nodes record their own energy state by calculate their energy level criticality and the node also knows the energy levels of the nodes around him. When the energy level falls below a certain threshold (dependant on the energy levels of its neighbors) and it is the current leader, it may opt to restart the leader election process as its more depleted then its neighbors. This way all the nodes get equal power utilization.

Figure 6: S-MAC power consumption compared to other MAC protocols, image taken from the paper of Wei Ye et al [9]

7.2

Design

7.

ER-MAC

The ER-MAC protocol is a extension on the S-MAC protocol and has been developed by Rajgopal Kannan et al [2]. Its main extensions are that it takes into account the power usage distribution of the nodes in the network. In S-MAC, a few nodes that route many messages throughout the network may get depleted much faster as they consume power at a much higher rate then other nodes. This may create holes or lead to premature network failure if a lot of critical nodes fail.

ER-MAC does not deal with any routing, and purely handles communications between neighbors. Because the protocol depends on time slotting a accurate clock is needed to keep synchronization with neighbors. This clock must have a low jitter and drift to keep periodic synchronization to a minimum. The node itself needs to monitor its own power level and must be aware how much energy it contains. This can be done by knowing what capacity the battery has and using a energy gauge (coulomb counter) to measure how much power is being consumed.

7.3

Results

The paper of Rajgopal Kannan et al [2] contains some simulation results from the MAC protocol they developed.

7.1

Operation

7.3.1

Experimental setup

The ER-MAC protocol extends the following aspects of the S-MAC. Collision avoidance Power aware participation First, each node computes its energy level criticality, this is the amount of energy the node has left. Some nodes consume more energy in the network then others, so this energy level is communicated to the other nodes. This way the nodes can elect the node with the highest power level, and thus distribute power usage across the network. The protocol starts with a selection of a local leader for a group of nodes. This leader election is done by the nodes that transmit energy-level messages. This leader election process can be restarted at any time.

The experimental setup is done in simulation. In the simulation 100 moving nodes where distributed on a grid of 1000 by 1000 meters.

7.3.2

Numbers and analysis

The experiments compares the ER-MAC protocol to basic TDMA, unfortunately no comparison is made to 802.11 or its predecessor S-MAC. Figure 7 shows the dierence of power consumption between ER-MAC and TDMA-MAC protocols over a period of time. While gure 8 shows how time is spent sleeping and being awake when given a amount of time-slots. Since no comparisons are made in respect to any other protocol no metrics can be given.

8.

TRAMA

The TRac Adaptive Medium Acces Protocol (TRAMA Protocol) tries to minimize power consumption by synchronizing the transmitter as well as the receiver. It is created by Rajendran et al [4].

7.1.1

Collision avoidance

In this MAC protocol there are by design no collisions, all the nodes are allocated a set of TDMA slots that do not interfere with the nodes around them. The leaders usually get more slots as their energy level will allow this extra power

8.1

Operation

To be as energy ecient as possible TRAMA let nodes sleep not only when no node is sending, but also when a node is not the intended receiver of the sender. Also, when a node

Figure 7: Dierence in energy of minimum energy node under ERMAC versus basic TDMA. Figure taken from the research of Rajgopal Kannan et al [2] has no information to send, it will give up its slot, so other nodes may send. To be able to do this TRAMA relies on 3 protocols. Neighbor Protocol (NP). Schedule Exchange Protocol (SEP). Adaptive Election Algorithm (AEA).

Figure 8: Average number of slots a node is awake and is asleep. Figure taken from the research of Rajgopal Kannan et al [2]

8.1.1

Neighbor Protocol

To counter the hidden terminal eect each node in the network has to know its one- and two-hop neighbors. So it knows who the neighbors of his neighbors are. This protocol is prone to collision and to allow all nodes to be discovered a sucient long time should be taken. Only during this phase new nodes can be added to the network. Depending of the type of network this phase has to occur more or less often. Since every node is able to send during this phase a node has to be receiving when not sending. Therefore this phase is rather power consuming. During this phase a node picks a random slot to send information about his one-hop neighborhood. The node will mention which nodes are no longer in its reach and which nodes are new. If a node has no new information to send it will still send an empty message, so that other nodes know that this node is still alive.

Figure 9: Hidden three-hop terminal, Rajendran et al [4]

vacant slots can be used by other nodes, a vacant slot is represented by selecting no receivers. The last winning slot is always used to announce the new schedule, and all one-hop nodes are intended receivers. The vacant slots can be used by other node as though the node that discarded them had lower priority, during this slot.

8.1.3 8.1.2 Schedule Exchange Protocol

After the NP phase the time slotted performance starts. The nodes will start making a schedule to send their data collision free. Each node calculates a schedule interval, which is based on the overall rate on which packets are produced by the higher level application. Then for that interval the node will calculate for which slots it has the highest priority among all its two-hop neighbors, these slots are called winning slots. For each winning slot the node will select intended receivers. Depending on the message queue of a node a node will not necessary need all winning slots. These

Adaptive Election Algorithm

This algorithm will change the state of a node. A node has three states in which it can be. These are either sending, when the node has highest priority among all nodes that need to send data. Or receiving, when it is the intended receiver of the sending node. Or it is sleeping when it is not in one of the two states. As can be seen in Figure 9 node Bs absolute winner for a particular time slot is node D. This means that node B cannot send. However it can still receive message from node A, which is not aected by node Ds higher priority, because it

is three hops away. Therefore each node also has to calculate which node can possibly send although it is not the highest priority node in its two hop vicinity.

8.2

Design

TRAMA has little support for dynamic nodes. This is because the nodes dene a (local) schedule among each other which they continue to use for a long period. This period should be long, because this is the main advantage over collision based protocols. When the NP is executed more often the advantage of TRAMA is gone. Also, because nodes need to exchange neighbors, for scheduling, base station are out the question. Nodes need to be able to communicate to each other, bi-directional trac. When a certain node has more data to send, burst like, this should be accounted for in advance. The priority of this node should be high, so it will get more timeslots. When nodes are distributed random over a eld it is often not known which nodes will be prone to sending bursts of data. The application which drives TRAMA should increase the nodes priority and schedule interval. The schedule interval can be changed every time it expires. The priority of a node is a function of the nodes identity number (each node needs a number) and the number of the time slot, this ways each node is able to get highest priority. This function can be communicated over the network, when it needs to change. Since TRAMA heavily relies on timing the clocks of each node should not drift. Depending on how fast the system should operate small drifts are allowed. These small drifts can be contained by use of time stamping. Each node will communicate to each neighbors at least once each schedule interval, so clocks will not drift to much.

Figure 10: 3 Dierent simulated networks, Rajendran et al [4] In case that delay is not a problem and network lifetime and correct delivery have priority TRAMA is a good choice. As can be seen in Figure 11 depending on the structure of the network nodes can sleep up to 90% of the time, which is better then S-MAC with 80%.

9.

DISCUSSION AND COMPARISON

The MAC protocols treated here can be divided into three main groups: Contention based protocols: These protocols have no notion of time and it uses the medium when it is available. Time based protocols: Assignment of the medium is done by timing, hence, time based protocols. Hybrid: A combination of parts from timing and contention based protocols.

8.3

Results

TRAMA is put to the test in respect to other protocols, S-MAC, CSMA and IEEE 802.11. This is done using simulations, as described by Rajendran et al [4].

9.1

Contention Based protocols

8.3.1

Simulation setup

The simulations uses the simulation platform Qualnet. The radio simulated is based on a common radio in sensor networks, TR1000. The power consumptions for transmitting is 24.75mW, for receiving is 13.5mW and for sleeping is 15W. The nodes have on average 6 one-hop and 17 two-hop neighbors, the schedule interval is set to 100 for all nodes.

Contention based protocols attempt to use the medium when it is available. There are various methods of declaring that the medium is busy, like the CTS/RTS scheme used in the 802.11. Many protocols reuse this scheme to solve the hidden terminal problem. Any node can use the medium at any time, this can introduce a few problems: one node can occupy the medium for a long time while other nodes need to wait until the medium is released. There are methods by circumventing this by either using placing bounds on the maximum transmission length and by introducing QoS rules. The contention based protocols have some advantages and disadvantages: + Ease of implementation in code and memory. + Full bandwidth is available to any node that needs it. + Handles dynamic networks well. - Fairness is not ensured as one node can occupy the medium for a long time. - Receiver needs to be active for the virtual carrier sense mechanism.

8.3.2

Simulation results

Tests were conducted with several netwerk structures (see Figure 10, but always is one sink collection data from several sources. In average TRAMA delivers more and more packets successfully when the load goes up, in respect to the other protocols, which become congested. But it comes with a price on the delay, buers ll and messages are delayed a factor 1000. The energy saving for TRAMA are a lot better on the other hand. As can be seen in Figure 11 in the average of the three scenarios TRAMA sleeps more then S-MAC when the load goes up. Where as S-MAC stays constant at 80% sleep time TRAMA averages on 85%. The sleep duration of S-MAC is on average 50ms, TRAMA gets on average 500ms, a factor 10 improvement.

Figure 11: Percentage Energy Savings, Rajendran et al [4] Type Contention Contention Hybrid Time slot Time slot Congest No No No Yes No E aware No No No Yes No sleep No Yes Yes Yes Yes we have looked on how various power optimizations can be made in these protocols. IEEE 802.11 is not suitable for wireless sensor networks, it assumed that the receiver is in continual operation. This drains the batteries of a node quickly and limit its usefulness. The S-MAC protocol [9] and PAMAS [5] try to work around by reducing the amount of time spent in idle reception. SMAC does this by creating a sleeping schedule that it synchronizes with its neighbors, so all the nodes sleep and awake at the same time. During the active period S-MAC acts like a contention based protocol. This method has the advantage that if the full bandwidth of the medium is required the schedule can be adapted to accommodate this. The reasoning behind S-MAC is that bandwidth is traded for energy consumption. PAMAS does this by turning a node o-line when it overhears a transmission not intended for the node. The ER-MAC protocol [2] and TRAMA protocol [4] are the timing based protocols we have treated. The ER-MAC protocol has some adaptations that make the protocol aware to the energy level at each node. Whilst TRAMA depends more on a static priority assignments, which is made more exible by analyzing the application above. The comparisons made here only reect on power usage by one individual node, we do not take into account network topology, density and error rates. The experiments conducted by each of the creators of the protocols dier greatly so no good operational comparison can be made.

802.11 PAMAS S-MAC ER-MAC TRAMA

Table 1: Feature comparison of MAC protocols

9.2

Timing Based protocols

Timing based protocols use time based scheduling to control what node has access to the medium. The usual method is using TDMA time slotting as a schedule to access the medium. The Timing based protocols have some advantages and disadvantages: + Collision prevention due to time slotting. + Transceivers only have to operate during designated time slots, and can sleep the rest of the time. - Complex implementation with schedule creation. - Does not handle dynamic and mobile networks well.

9.3

Hybrid protocols

There are some protocols that combine some aspects of timing and contention based protocols. There are a lot of dierent combinations so no general advantages or disadvantages can be given.

10.

CONCLUSION

9.4

Comparison

Table 1 shows to what classes various MAC protocols belong to. We have compared these protocols in their operation and have especially focused on power consumption, but also

Timing based MAC protocols are more energy ecient as they avoid idle listening that is prevalent in contention based protocols. There are various optimizations possible for both the contention based MAC protocols and the timing based protocols

Methods of improving the bandwidth allocation of timing based MAC protocols can be improved by using Quality of Service metrics for the data, combined with adaptive timings of the schedule according to bandwidth requirements. For mobile and dynamic networks contention based protocols are more suitable as there is no setup and schedule creation phase that new nodes are not aware of. There are ways to x this problem in timing based protocols as periodic rescheduling with the network. For static and low bandwidth applications timing based protocols are recommended while for highly dynamic and or high bandwidth applications contention based protocols are more suitable. When evaluating MAC protocols for your own application pay close attention to how large the factor of improvement is. For example: the baseline ooding protocol with no optimization has a endurance of 1 day, and one improved protocol has a 100% improvement. This only improves the endurance by one day. When evaluating protocols improvements of a factor 10 or 100 are more desirable.

11.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank professor Johan J. Lukkien for giving us insights into the world of wireless sensor networks.

12.

REFERENCES

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