ERI-MAC: An Energy-Harvested Receiver-Initiated MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Energy harvesting technology potentially solves the problem of energy efficiency, which is the biggest challenge in wireless sensor networks. The sensor node, which has a capability of harvesting energy from the surrounding environment, is able to achieve infinitive lifetime. The technology promisingly changes the fundamental principle of communication protocols in wireless sensor networks. Instead of saving energy as much as possible, the protocols should guarantee that the harvested energy is equal to or bigger than the consumed energy. At the same time, the protocols are designed to have the efficient operation and maximum network performance. In this paper, we propose ERI-MAC, a new receiver-initiated MAC protocol for energy harvesting sensor networks. ERI-MAC leverages the benefit of receiver-initiated and packet concatenation to achieve good performance both in latency and in energy efficiency. Moreover, ERI-MAC employs a queueing mechanism to adjust the operation of a sensor node following the energy harvesting rate from the surrounding environment. We have extensively evaluated ERI-MAC in a large scale network with a realistic traffic model using the network simulator ns-2. The simulation results show that ERI-MAC achieves good network performance, as well as enabling infinitive lifetime of sensor networks.

Power-Efficient Beacon Recognition Method Based on Periodic Wake-Up for Industrial Wireless Devices

“…To determine the duty cycle, this method monitors the amount of generated power using the battery level and a threshold. In [ 20 ], an energy-harvested receiver-initiated MAC (ERI-MAC) concatenates small packets without packet headers, and it eliminates overhead information. Furthermore, this method regards acknowledgment packets as the beacon packets.…”

MAC Protocols for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks: Survey

“…A receiver-initiated MAC protocol for EH-WSNs (ERI-MAC) is a CSMA-based scheme that employs a queueing framework to adjust the duty cycles of nodes, thereby achieving an ENO state [25]. The packet transmission strategy is similar to that of PP-MAC and OD-MAC.…”

Energy-efficient medium access control for energy harvesting communications

“…There are dozens of receiver-initiated MAC protocols in the literature [13], offering various features that focus on different constraints, scenarios and applications. For example, QAEE-MAC [23] and EEPB-MAC [24] focus on traffic with high priority; ERI-MAC [25] concatenates small packets to larger packets; RP-MAC [26] reorders packets in the transmission queue; RF-MAC [27] focuses on RF energy harvesting; and ADM [28] extends the paradigm with broadcasting support. The wide variety of protocol variations and features in the literature indicates that there is no global solution that performs well in every possible environment and application.…”