A bit-map-assisted energy-efficient MAC scheme for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The low-energy characteristics of Wireless Sensor Networks pose a great design challenge for MAC protocol design. The cluster-based scheme is a promising solution. Recent studies have proposed different cluster-based MAC protocols. We propose an intracluster communication bit-map-assisted (BMA) MAC protocol. BMA is intended for event-driven applications. The scheduling of BMA can change dynamically according to the unpredictable variations of sensor networks. In terms of energy efficiency, BMA reduces energy consumption due to idle listening and collisions. In this study, we develop two different analytic energy models for BMA, conventional Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) and energy efficient TDMA (E-TDMA) when used as intra-cluster MAC schemes. Simulation experiments are constructed to validate the analytic models. Both analytic and simulation results show that in terms of energy efficiency, BMA performance heavily depends on the sensor node traffic offer load, the number of sensor nodes within a cluster, the data packet size and, in some cases, the number of sessions per round. BMA is superior for the cases of low and medium traffic loads, relatively few sensor nodes per cluster, and relatively large data packet sizes. In addition, BMA outperforms the TDMAbased MAC schemes in terms of average packet latency.

Primitive and Scheduled-Based Sensor Networks MAC Protocol: A Survey

“…Bit-map-assisted (BMA) [25] MAC protocol is a large-scale cluster-oriented WSNs. It is designed predominantly for event-driven approaches, where source node sends the data packet to the cluster head only for essential events.…”

Locally scheduled packet bursting for data collection in wireless sensor networks

“…Congestion Mitigation at MAC Layer: In order to alleviate interference and contention, various TDMA based MAC protocols [19][20][21][22] and hybrid CSMA/TDMA techniques [1,2,23] have been proposed. TDMA based approaches [19][20][21][22] suffer from high global time-synchronization and slot assignment overheads, which make them unsuitable for scenarios with changing traffic patterns.…”

“…TDMA based approaches [19][20][21][22] suffer from high global time-synchronization and slot assignment overheads, which make them unsuitable for scenarios with changing traffic patterns. For example, in dynamic or moving event scenarios, not all the sensors need to report data to the sink.…”

Energy-efficient power/rate control and scheduling in hybrid TDMA/CDMA wireless sensor networks

“…Under large node population, Group TDMA still needs a lot of slots in each frame. The bit-map-assisted MAC (BMA-MAC) proposed in [13] improved upon LEACH by partitioning a frame into two segments, i.e., data transmission segment and idle segment, and the boundary between them is adjustable. Only those nodes that have data to send in the current frame will be allocated with a dedicated slot in the data transmission segment.…”

“…Only those nodes that have data to send in the current frame will be allocated with a dedicated slot in the data transmission segment. The analytical work in [14] and [15] further improved upon [13] by showing that the ultimate energy-optimal transmission under TDMA requires variable slot lengths for different nodes in each frame. Let alone the difficulty of the extremely strict synchronization among sensors in order to align slots of variable length together, the complexity of the algorithm, which decides the optimal slot lengths for individual sensors, grows exponentially with the number of active nodes.…”