Energy efficient and QoS aware medium access control for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

SUMMARYEnabling quality of service (QoS) applications over battery-constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs) poses significant challenges, because of the special characteristics of such networks. Developing real-time applications for WSNs necessitates the development of new communication protocols capable of achieving application-specific QoS and at the same time save energy. In this paper, we continue our previous work on developing and improving our EQ-MAC protocol, which is designed specifically for WSNs to reduce energy consumption and provides QoS guarantees through the use of the service differentiation concept. The proposed protocol consists of two subprotocols: Classifier MAC (C-MAC) and Channel Access MAC (CA-MAC). C-MAC is responsible of classifying gathered data at sensor nodes based on its importance. The CA-MAC is an energy conserving medium access mechanism which uses a hybrid scheduling technique. CA-MAC saves energy by differentiating between control and data messages. Data messages are assigned scheduled slots with no contention (here we have to emphasize that slots are assigned only to those nodes that have data to send, this allows an efficient energy use of the Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) slots), whereas short periodic control messages are assigned random access slots. To study the performance of the EQ-MAC protocol, we have conducted several simulation experiments on Network Simulator (NS-2) to evaluate and compare the performance of our protocol against S-MAC and Q-MAC protocols. Simulation results demonstrate that EQ-MAC outperforms the other two protocols and achieves a significant improvement in terms of the energy expenditure and delivery ratio. Under prioritized traffic, EQ-MAC is comparable to Q-MAC in average latency, while achieving less energy consumption. Copyright

Evaluating the impact of next node selection criteria on Quality of Service dynamic routing

“…A fully distributed scheduling scheme for video streaming over multi-channel multi-radio multi-hop wireless networks was presented in [14]. In [15], an energy-aware MAC and routing mechanisms was designed specifically for WSNs to reduce energy consumption and provides QoS guarantees. In [16], a detailed survey on QoS routing protocols and MANETs was presented.…”

Proportional throughput differentiationwith cognitive load-control on WSN channels

“…Many QoS-aware MAC protocols for WSNs address how to satisfy QoS requirements and ensure efficient resource usage at network overload [6][7][8]. They require however changes to off-the-shelf MAC hardware, software of both.…”

“…The need for transmission predictability in WSNs has driven research on QoS-aware MAC protocols capable of supporting predictable transmission rate in environments with changing radio conditions and moving object impacting on transmission quality [6][7][8]. The IEEE is working on standardizing the 802.…”

Tree TDMA MAC Algorithm Using Time and Frequency Slot Allocations in Tree-Based WSNs

“…Representative protocols include Sparse Topology and Energy Management (STEM) [10], MT-MAC [11], Energy-efficient and QoS-aware MAC (EQ-MAC) [19], QoS-aware MAC (Q-MAC) [20], Z-MAC, TDMA based multichannel MAC (TMMAC) [21], Trafficadaptive MAC (TRAMA) [7,22], and self-organizing media access control for sensor networks (SMACS) [23,24]. Although these hybrid MACs improve performance in terms of network throughput, delay, and so on, they exhibit limited effectiveness in addressing the funneling effect, overhearing problem, and energy consumption.…”