Abstract
Radio interference may lead to packet losses, thus negatively affecting the performance of sensornet applications. In this paper, we experimentally assess the impact of external interference on state-of-the-art sensornet MAC protocols. Our experiments illustrate that specific features of existing protocols, e.g., hand-shaking schemes preceding the actual data transmission, play a critical role in this setting. We leverage these results by identifying mechanisms to improve the robustness of existing MAC protocols under interference. These mechanisms include the use of multiple hand-shaking attempts coupled with packet trains and suitable congestion backoff schemes to better tolerate interference. We embed these mechanisms within an existing X-MAC implementation and show that they considerably improve the packet delivery rate while keeping the power consumption at a moderate level.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Boano, C.A., He, Z., Li, Y., Voigt, T., Zuniga, M., Willig, A.: Controllable Radio Interference for Experimental and Testing Purposes in Wireless Sensor Networks. In: Proc. of the 4th Workshop on Practical Issues in Building Sensor Network Applications (SenseApp), Zurich, Switzerland, October 2009. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2008)
Buettner, M., Yee, V., Anderson, E., Han, R.: X-MAC: a short preamble MAC protocol for duty-cycled wireless sensor networks. In: ACM SenSys (2006)
Musaloiu-E., R., Liang, C.-J.M., Terzis, A.: Koala: Ultra-Low Power Data Retrieval in Wireless Sensor Networks. In: IPSN 2008 (2008)
TinyOS Community Forum. TinyOS TEP 126 - CC2420 radio stack, http://www.tinyos.net/tinyos-2.x/doc/html/tep126.html
Voigt, T., Österlind, F.: CoReDac: Collision-free command-response data collection. In: 13th IEEE Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, Hamburg, Germany (September 2008)
Lu, G., Krishnamachari, B., Raghavendra, C.: An adaptive energy-efficient and low-latency mac for data gathering in wireless sensor networks. In: International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS (2004)
Bertocco, M., Gamba, G., Sona, A.: Experimental Optimization of CCA Thresholds in Wireless Sensor Networks in the Presence of Interference. In: Proc. of IEEE Workshop on ElectroMagnetic Compatibility (IEEE EMC) (June 2007)
Mainwaring, A., Polastre, J., Szewczyk, R., Culler, D., Anderson, J.: Wireless sensor networks for habitat monitoring. In: First ACM Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications (WSNA 2002) (September 2002)
Tolle, G., et al.: A macroscope in the redwoods. In: SenSys, pp. 51–63 (2005)
Dunkels, A., Österlind, F., Tsiftes, N., He, Z.: Software-based on-line energy estimation for sensor nodes. In: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (EmNetS), Cork, Ireland (June 2007)
Chintalapudi, K.K., Venkatraman, L.: On the design of mac protocols for low-latency hard real-time discrete control applications over 802.15.4 hardware. In: The 7th Conf. on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN) (April 2008)
Polastre, J., Hill, J., Culler, D.: Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks. In: ACM SenSys (2004)
El-Hoiydi, A., Decotignie, J.D.: Wisemac: An ultra low power mac protocol for the downlink of infrastructure wireless sensor networks. In: ISCC (June 2004)
Moss, D., Levis, P.: Box-macs: Exploiting physical and link layer boundaries in low-power networking. Technical Report SING-08-00, Stanford University (2002)
Tassiulas, L., Sarkar, S.: Maxmin fair scheduling in wireless ad hoc networks. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 23(1), 163–173 (2005)
Chen, L., Low, S.H., Doyle, J.C.: Joint congestion control and media access control design for ad hoc wireless networks. In: INFOCOM (2005)
Yi, Y., Shakkottai, S.: Hop-by-hop congestion control over a wireless multi-hop network. IEEE/ACM Transactions On Networking 15(1), 133–144 (2007)
Yi, Y., de Veciana, G., Shakkottai, S.: On optimal MAC scheduling with physical interference. In: INFOCOM (2007)
Zhou, G., He, T., Stankovic, J.A., Abdelzaher, T.: RID: Radio interference detection in wireless sensor networks. In: INFOCOM (2005)
Zhou, G., et al.: Models and solutions for radio irregularity in wireless sensor networks. ACM Trans. Sen. Netw. 2(2), 221–262 (2006)
Rangwala, S., Gummadi, R., Govindan, R., Psounis, K.: Interference-aware fair rate control in wireless sensor networks. In: ACM SIGCOMM (2006)
Musaloiu-E, R., Terzis, A.: Minimising the effect of wifi interference in 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks. Journal of Sensor Networks 3, 43–54 (2007)
Hauer, J., Handziski, V., Wolisz, A.: Experimental study of the impact of wlan interference on ieee 802.15.4 body area networks. In: Roedig, U., Sreenan, C.J. (eds.) EWSN 2009. LNCS, vol. 5432, pp. 17–32. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Yuan, Z., et al.: A backoff copying scheme for contention resolution in wireless sensor networks. In: Wintech (September 2009)
Athanasopoulos, A., et al.: 802.15.4: The effect of different back-off schemes on power and qos characteristics. In: IEEE ICWMC (2007)
Jamieson, K., Balakrishnan, H., Tay, Y.C.: Sift: a mac protocol for event-driven wireless sensor networks. In: Römer, K., Karl, H., Mattern, F. (eds.) EWSN 2006. LNCS, vol. 3868, pp. 260–275. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Boano, C.A., Voigt, T., Tsiftes, N., Mottola, L., Römer, K., Zúñiga, M.A. (2010). Making Sensornet MAC Protocols Robust against Interference. In: Silva, J.S., Krishnamachari, B., Boavida, F. (eds) Wireless Sensor Networks. EWSN 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5970. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11917-0_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11917-0_18
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-11916-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-11917-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)