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Low Power Downlink MAC Protocols for Infrastructure Wireless Sensor Networks

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Abstract

This paper addresses low power medium access control (MAC) protocols for the downlink channel of infrastructure wireless sensor networks. Access points are assumed to be energy unconstrained. The trade-off between the power consumption of the sensor nodes and the transmission delay is analyzed, focusing on low traffic. We describe WiseMAC (Wireless Sensor MAC), a new protocol for the downlink of infrastructure wireless sensor networks. Another original contribution is the presentation and analysis of PTIP (Periodic Terminal Initiated Polling). Here, polling is used in the reversed direction as compared to common polling protocols. WiseMAC and PTIP are compared with PSM (Power Save Mode), the power save protocol used in both the IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee standards. Analytical expressions are derived for the power consumption and the transmission delay for each protocol, as a function of the wake-up period. It is shown that WiseMAC provides, with low bit rate radio transceivers, a significantly lower power consumption than PSM. Although less energy efficient than WiseMAC and PSM, it is shown that PTIP can, thanks to its implementation simplicity, become attractive for applications tolerating large transmission delays.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSEM, Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

    Amre El-Hoiydi & Jean-Dominique Decotignie

Authors
  1. Amre El-Hoiydi
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  2. Jean-Dominique Decotignie
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Correspondence to Amre El-Hoiydi.

Additional information

Amre El-Hoiydi received the electrical engineer degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland, in 1994. In 1995, he was a teaching assistant at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), working on mobility management for low earth orbit mobile satellite communication systems. In 1996, he joined CSEM (Neuchâtel, Switzerland). Since then, he has been working on several research and development projects dealing with various aspects of wireless communications. In the ACTS RAINBOW and FRAMES projects, he was involved with the network and air interface aspects of 3rd generation cellular systems. In the ESPRIT INFOGATE and IST OPENROUTER projects, he worked on electronic design and embedded programming of Linux based wireless LAN gateways. His current research focus is low power communication protocols for wireless sensor networks.

Jean-Dominique Decotignie is head of the real-time and networking group at the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microsystems (CSEM) in Neuchâtel. He is professor at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences of EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) and teaches real-time systems as well as hardware and software design. From 1977 to 1982, he has worked at EPFL and the University of Tokyo in the area of optical communications. In 1983, he joined the Industrial Computer Engineering Lab. at EPFL where he became Assistant Professor in 1992. From 1989 to 1992, he has been the head of an interdisciplinary project on Computer Integrated Manufacturing at EPFL. Since January 1997, he is with CSEM. His current research interests include industrial and real-time local area networks, distributed control systems and software engineering for real-time systems as well as real-time wireless networks.

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El-Hoiydi, A., Decotignie, JD. Low Power Downlink MAC Protocols for Infrastructure Wireless Sensor Networks. Mobile Netw Appl 10, 675–690 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-005-3362-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-005-3362-y

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