Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

An Energy-Efficient Self-Adaptive Duty Cycle MAC Protocol for Traffic-Dynamic Wireless Sensor Networks

  • Published:
Wireless Personal Communications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

A plenty of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols deal with static traffics with low traffic load. The performance of these protocols drops significantly when network traffic become dynamic or in high traffic load. In this paper, we propose a new MAC protocol called Self-Adaptive Duty Cycle MAC (SEA-MAC) by introducing dual adaptive mechanisms: (1) An Adaptive Scheduling (AS) mechanism which makes the nodes’ active duration adaptive to variable traffic load, thus enabling SEA-MAC to resiliently schedule data transmission for the Sleep period. The algorithm is designated to schedule more data transmission in bursty and high traffic load, thus enabling rapid dissemination of data and reduction of latency. While under the light traffic load, nodes enter the Sleep mode timely, mitigating idle listening and saving energy. (2) A Self-Adaptive duty cycle mechanism which further adjusts the duty cycle and makes SEA-MAC adaptive to the dynamic traffic loads. When network experience with very low or very high traffic load, the protocol further adjusts duty cycle dynamically based on the traffic load, thus reducing inefficient duty cycle or reduce end-to-end delay. Experiment results show that the SEA-MAC is a great advancement compared with AS-MAC and RI-MAC protocols on the performance for unicast scenarios, especially under heavy unicast traffic load. SEA-MAC can reduce average and max end-to-end delay up to 50.90 and 68.20% respectively, lower energy consumption up to about 16.28%, and increase PDR up to about 16% compared with AS-MAC. SEA-MAC superiors to RI-MAC in average end-to-end delay by up to 80% and in maximum end-to-end delay up to 90% for all the traffic load in question. SEA-MAC outperforms RI-MAC significantly in average duty cycle under medium and heavy traffic load.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Energy consumption in wireless nodes (2006): http://www.cwc.oulu.fi.

  2. Kasten, O. Energy Consumption. Eldgenossische Technische Hochschule Zurich http://www.inf.ethz.ch/~kasten/research/bathtub/energy_consumption.html.

  3. ASH Transceiver TR1000 Datasheet. RF Monolithics Inc.

  4. Wei, Y., Heidemann, J., & Estrin, D. (2002). An energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of twenty-first annual joint conference of the IEEE computer and communications societies (INFOCOM 2002). IEEE 2002 (Vol. 3, pp. 1567–1576).

  5. Polastre, J., Hill, J., & Culler, D. (2004). Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACMSenSys conference. November 2004 (pp. 95–107).

  6. Wei Y., Heidemann J., Estrin D. (2004) Medium access control with coordinated adaptive sleeping for wireless sensor networks. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 12(3): 493–506

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Tijs Van, D., & Koen, L. (2003). An adaptive energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 1st international conference on embedded networked sensor systems, Los Angeles, California, USA: ACM.

  8. Du, S., Saha, A., & Johnson, D. (2007). RMAC: A routing-enhanced duty-cycle MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 26th annual IEEE conference on computer communications (INFOCOM 2007), May 2007 (pp. 1478–1486).

  9. Sun, Y., Du, S., Gurewitz, O., & Johnson, D. (2008). DW-MAC: A low latency, energy efficient demand wakeup MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the ninth ACM international symposium on mobile Ad Hoc networking and computing (MobiHoc’08), May 2008 (pp. 53–62).

  10. Gandhi, R. Parthasarathy, S., & Mishra, A. (2003). Minimizing broadcast latency and redundancy in Ad Hoc networks. In Proceedings of the fourth ACM international symposium on mobile Ad Hoc networking and computing (MobiHoc 2003), June 2003 (pp. 222–232).

  11. El-Hoiydi, A., & Decotignie, J. (2004). WiseMAC: An ultra low power MAC protocols for the downlink of infrastructure wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the ninth IEEE symposium on computers and communication (ISCC2004), June 2004 (pp. 244–251).

  12. Buettner, M., Yee, G. V., Anderson, E., & Han, R. (2006). X-MAC: A short preamble MAC protocol for duty-cycled wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 4th international conference on embedded networked sensor systems, 2006 (pp. 307–320).

  13. Sun, Y., Du, S., Gurewitz, O., & Johnson, David B. (2008). RI-MAC: A receiver-initiated asynchronous duty cycle MAC protocol for dynamic traffic loads in wireless sensor networks. In SenSys’08, November 5–7, 2008. North Carolina, USA: Raleigh.

  14. Rajendran, V. Obraczka, K., & Garcia-Luna-Aceves, J. J. (2003, 2006). Energy-efficient, collision-free medium access control for wireless sensor networks, 1st published in Proceedings of the first international conference on embedded networked sensor systems, 2003 (pp. 181–192). ACM Press. 2nd published in Wireless Networks Vol. 12, No. 2, February 2006, pp. 63–78.

  15. Rajendran, V., Garcia-Luna-Aceves, J. J., & Obraczka, K. (2005). Energy-efficient, application-aware medium access for sensor networks. In Proceedings of 2005 international conference on mobile Adhoc and sensor systems conference (MASS 2005), November 2005.

  16. Yessad, S., Nat-Abdesselam, F., Taleb T., & Bensaou B. (2007). R-MAC: Reservation medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks. In IEEE computer society, 32nd IEEE conference on local computer networks (pp. 719–724).

  17. Zhao Y. Z., Miao C. Y., Ma M., Nguyen T. N. (2010) An energy-efficient and low-latency MAC protocol with adaptive scheduling for multi-hop wireless sensor networks. Computer Communications 33(12): 1452–1461. doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2010.03.025

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Yang, S.-H. et al. (2005). Utilization based duty cycle tuning MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of global telecommunication conference 2005. IEEE GLOBECOM 2005 (pp. 3258–3262). doi:10.1109/GLOCOM.2005.1578377.

  19. Lin P., Qiao C., Wang X. (2004) Medium access control with a dynamic duty cycle for sensor networks. IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference 3: 1534–1539

    Google Scholar 

  20. Justin, T. K., et al. (2007). An adaptable energy-efficient medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks. In System sciences, 2007. HICSS 2007. 40th annual Hawaii international conference on (pp. 292a–292a).

  21. Yadav R., Varma S., Malaviya N. (2008) Optimized medium access control for wireless sensor network. International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security (IJCSNS) 8(2): 334–338

    Google Scholar 

  22. Stojmenovic M., Nayak A. (2006) Localized routing with guaranteed delivery and a realistic physical layer in wireless sensor networks. Computer Communications 29(13–14): 2550–2555

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Ganeriwal, S., Kumar, R., & Srivastava M. B. (2008). Timing-sync protocol for sensor networks. In Proceedings of the first international conference on embedded networked sensor systems (SenSys 2003), November 2003 (pp. 138–149).

  24. Discrete Event Simulation System (2008): http://www.omnetpp.org/.

  25. Tang, L., Sun, Y. J., Gurewitz, O. Johnson, & David, B. (2011). PW-MAC: An energy-efficient predictive-wakeup MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 30th IEEE international conference on computer communications (INFOCOM 2011) April 2011 (pp. 1305–1313).

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

    Y. Z. Zhao & C. Y. Miao

  2. School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

    M. Ma

Authors
  1. Y. Z. Zhao
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. C. Y. Miao
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. M. Ma
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Y. Z. Zhao.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Zhao, Y.Z., Miao, C.Y. & Ma, M. An Energy-Efficient Self-Adaptive Duty Cycle MAC Protocol for Traffic-Dynamic Wireless Sensor Networks. Wireless Pers Commun 68, 1287–1315 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-012-0508-7

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-012-0508-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation