Modeling and Performance Analysis for Duty-Cycled MAC Protocols with Applications to S-MAC and X-MAC

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are often battery-powered, and hence extending the network lifetime is one of the primary concerns in the ubiquitous deployment of wireless sensor networks. One approach to efficiently utilize the limited energy supplies of the sensors is to have the medium access control (MAC) protocol duty-cycle the sensors, periodically putting the sensors to sleep and waking them up to reduce idle listening, which is energy intensive. Among duty-cycled MAC protocols, some protocols are synchronized so that nodes wake up at the same time in each cycle, and other protocols are asynchronous, where nodes have arbitrary offsets to start their cycles. For protocol designers, it is important to understand which type of duty-cycled MAC protocol should be chosen (synchronized or asynchronous),as well as what values should be assigned to the protocol parameters under a given network scenario in order to achieve a desirable performance for throughput, delay or energy consumption.

Performance Analysis of Synchronous Duty-Cycled MAC Protocols

“…Our work extends the study presented in [3] in three different aspects. First, a DTMC was proposed in [3] to describe the evolution of the number of packets in the buffer of a node.…”

“…Among them, an M/G/1 based model was proposed in [2], which requires that packet arrivals follow the Poisson process and that each node has an infinite buffer. Recently, a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) model was proposed in [3], supporting a more general packet arrival distribution per cycle and zero packet retransmission.…”

A Framework for Energy Based Performability Models for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…These eventually tend to follow exponential distribution considering that their arrival time at the server can never be determined. In this category however, the nodes require overhead for exchanging sleep/wake-up schedules with neighbouring nodes and can be very significant when the network data packet is light [2].…”

“…A number of schemes have been proposed to save energy in WSNs. These include implementation of sleep schedules within MAC [1] and [2] and routing [3] protocols and also in other layers. Hardware developers have also continued to improve devices with the aim of achieving low levels of energy consumption and efficiency [4].…”

Research Pathway towards MAC Protocol in Enhancing Network Performance in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

“…The outcomes are validated for enhanced efficiency. The performance and modeling analysis of MAP protocols with S-MAC and X-MAC are presented in Yang et al [31]. In this Markov model together with the performance analysis gives estimated throughput, energy consumption, and delay for both synchronized and asynchronous duty-cycled MAC protocols.…”