A scalable joint routing and scheduling scheme for large-scale wireless sensor networks

The multihop configuration of a large-scale wireless sensor network enables multiple simultaneous transmissions without interference within the network. Existing time division multiple access (TDMA) scheduling schemes exploit gain based on the assumption that the path is optimally determined by a routing protocol. In contrast, our scheme jointly considers routing and scheduling and introduces several new concepts. We model a large-scale wireless sensor network as a tiered graph relative to its distance from the sink, and introduce the notion of relay graph and relay factor to direct the next-hop candidates toward the sink fairly and efficiently. The sink develops a transmission and reception schedule for the sensor nodes based on the tiered graph search for a set of nodes that can simultaneously transmit and receive. The resulting schedule eventually allows data from each sensor node to be delivered to the sink. We analyze our scheduling algorithm both numerically and by simulation, and we discuss the impact of protocol parameters. Further, we prove that our scheme is scalable to the number of nodes, from the perspectives of mean channel capacity and maximum number of concurrent transmission nodes. Compared with the existing TDMA scheduling schemes, our scheme shows better performance in network throughput, path length, end-to-end delay, and fairness index.     

无线传感器网络环境下基于事件 驱动应用的节能TDMA协议

媒质接入控制是无线传感器网络设计的关键问题之一.由于媒质接入控制协议直接控制着节点无线通信模块的活动,而无线通信模块是传感器节点能量消耗的主要来源,因此MAC协议节能效率的好坏将严重影响网络的性能.基于TDMA的MAC协议具有固有的节能特性,即通过合理的TDMA调度避免传输碰撞以及减少节点空闲监听的时间.本文提出了ED-TDMA协议,一种面向事件驱动的传感器网络应用的TDMA协议.该协议根据当前源节点的数目动态地改变TDMA帧的长度,提高了信道利用率;同时采用位图方式的TDMA调度,极大地减少了TDMA调度的开销,节约了能量.此外,通过引入簇内覆盖的思想,使得簇内的活动节点数目为一常数,同时减少了工作节点的数目,从而延长网络的生命周期,并在一定程度上提高了系统的可伸缩性.实验结果显示,ED-TDMA协议更适用于网络负载较低、节点密度高的无线传感器网络.     

The problem of medium access control in wireless sensor networks

In this article we revisit the problem of scheduled access through a detailed foray into the questions of energy consumption and throughput for MAC protocols in wireless sensor networks. We consider a static network model that rules out simultaneous transmission and reception by any sensor node and consequently requires partitioning of nodes into disjoint sets of transmitters and receivers at any time instant. Under the assumption of circular transmission (reception) ranges with sharp boundaries, a greedy receiver activation heuristic is developed relying on the network connectivity map to determine distinct receiver groups to be activated within disjoint time intervals. To conserve limited energy resources in sensor networks, the time allocation to each receiver group is based on the residual battery energy available at the respective transmitters. Upon activating each receiver group separately, the additional time-division mechanism of group TDMA is imposed to schedule transmissions interfering at the non-intended destinations within separate fractions of time in order to preserve the reliable feedback information. The two-layered time-division structure of receiver activation and group TDMA algorithms offers distributed and polynomial-time solutions (as required by autonomous sensor networks) to the problems of link scheduling as well as energy and throughput-efficient resource allocation in wireless access. The associated synchronization and overhead issues are not considered in this article.     

Decentralized multiuser diversity with opportunistic packet transmission in MIMO wireless sensor networks

In this study, we consider a single-hop wireless sensor network where both the sensor nodes and the controller node have multiple antennas. We focus on single beam opportunistic communication and propose a threshold-based medium access control (MAC) scheme for uplink packet transmission which exploits multiuser diversity gain without feedback in a decentralized manner. Packet transfer from sensor nodes to the controller node is initiated when the channel quality of any node exceeds the predefined threshold based on the effective signal-to-noise ratio (ESNR) measurements at the sensor nodes through linear combining techniques. The optimum threshold is determined to maximize the probability of successful packet transmission where only one sensor node transmits its packet in one time-slot. The proposed scheme trades the successful packet rate to increase the SNR of the successful packets assuming Rayleigh fading and collision-based reception model. Computer simulations confirm that proposed scheme has higher successful packet SNR compared to the simple time division multiple access (TDMA)-based MAC scheme with round-robin fashion. The use of multiple antennas at the sensor nodes can also improve the throughput of proposed scheme compared with our previous scheme without implementing the spatial diversity at the SNs.     

TC2-MAC:一种无线传感器网络自适应混合 MAC 协议

摘 要：提出了一种新的自适应混合MAC协议TC2-MAC。该协议采用了基于二叉树结构的时隙块分配策略和基于时隙约束的CSMA/CA竞争接入方式,能够为不同传感器节点或不同类型业务的差异性QoS需求提供良好支持,并能够通过灵活的信息调度机制改善信道接入公平性,提高网络效率。理论分析和仿真结果表明：与传统基于TDMA机制的MAC协议相比,TC2-MAC对网络业务流量及拓扑结构的变化均具有更好的自适应性。     

CT-TDMA：水下传感器网络高效TDMA协议

针对水下无线传感器网络(UWSN,underwater sensor networks)提出以发送端为中心以连续时间为计量单位的冲突状态模型——局部冲突状态图及其分布式构建算法,并在此基础上设计了基于启发式规则的水下传感器网络TDMA协议(CT-TDMA,continuous time based TDMA)。CT-TDMA利用UWSN中同一接收节点与不同发送节点之间链路时延的差异性,减少在目的端的接收帧之间的空闲时间,从而提高网络流量;基于启发式规则的分配算法,能有效缩短连续时间轴上的时刻分配所花费的时间。模拟实验证明:CT-TDMA与以ST-MAC为代表的按时隙分配的TDMA方案相比,网络流量提高了20%,数据分组的端到端时延降低了18%;与由全局知识所计算出的最优分配策略相比,网络流量达到了80%,端到端时延仅延长了12%。     

一种用于水声传感网的MAC层协议

针对分簇的水声传感网,提出了一种基于时分多址（TDMA）的MAC层协议——Cluster-TDMA。该协议主要由规划阶段和传输阶段组成。规划阶段,首先由网关节点规划能造成簇间干扰的子节点的传输,其次由各簇头节点分别规划本簇内其他子节点的传输;传输阶段,子节点根据规划表周期性地向簇头节点发送数据,这些数据最终汇聚到网关节点。该协议简单有效地解决了引起簇间干扰子结点的传输规划问题。C++仿真实验表明,该协议具有良好的吞吐率和能量效率性能。     

BOD‐LEACH: broadcasting over duty‐cycled radio using LEACH clustering for delay/power efficient dissimilation in wireless sensor networks

Broadcasting delay‐sensitive information over a duty‐cycled wireless sensor network is considered, and a cluster‐based protocol is proposed. The proposed protocol, namely Broadcast over Duty‐Cycle and LEACH (BOD‐LEACH), takes advantage of the LEACH's energy‐efficient clustering. This approach shifts the total burden of energy consumption of a single cluster head by rotating the cluster‐head role among all nodes in the network. It also permits the ordinary (member) nodes in a cluster to turn off their radios whenever they enter inactive TDMA slots. However, LEACH does not consider broadcast messages, and the member nodes scheduling is established as a sequence of Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) without any common active period. A broadcast message should then be postponed to the next TDMA schedule and transmitted in a sequence of unicast messages, which is inefficient in terms of latency, bandwidth occupation, and power consumption. The proposed protocol adds new common static and dynamic broadcast periods to support and accelerate broadcasting. The dynamic periods are scheduled following the past arrivals of messages and using a Markov chain model. To our knowledge, this work is the first that proposes the use of clustering to perform simultaneous local broadcasts at several clusters. This reduces broadcast latency and ensures scalability. The protocol has been simulated, numerically analyzed, and compared with LEACH. The results show clear improvement over LEACH with regard to broadcast latency, at a low energy cost. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Deadline-aware scheduling of cooperative relayers in TDMA-based wireless industrial networks

In this paper we consider a scenario in which a set of source nodes wishes to transmit real-time data packets periodically to a central controller over lossy wireless links, while using a TDMA-based medium access control protocol. Furthermore, a number of relay nodes are present which can help the source nodes with packet retransmissions. The key question we consider in this paper is how to schedule the TDMA slots for retransmissions while taking advantage of the relay nodes, so that the average number of packets missing their deadlines is minimized. We provide a problem formulation for the general deadline-aware TDMA relay scheduling problem. Since the design space of the general problem is large, we also present one particular class of restricted TDMA relay scheduling problems. We suggest and numerically investigate a range of algorithms and heuristics, both optimal and suboptimal, of the restricted scheduling problem, which represent different trade-offs between achievable performance and computational complexity. Specifically, we introduce two different Markov Decision Process (MDP) based formulations for schedule computation of the restricted TDMA relay scheduling problem. One MDP formulation gives an optimal schedule, another (approximate) formulation gives a sub-optimal schedule which, however, comes very close to the optimal performance at much more modest computational and memory costs.     

A Dynamic Adaptation Mechanism for Traffic Conditions in Wireless Sensor Network

As overall network traffic pursue to expand, a lot of low-power medium access control protocols have been proposed to deal with burst traffic in wireless sensor network. Although most of them provide low throughput but do not well optimize the energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) and time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol that arranges nodes into two categories of priority according to their traffic rate and data transmission delay. Nodes that have continuous data should send its data during the contention free period, those one will be classified as low priority and its data will be scheduling using TDMA. Others nodes who have a random data should transmit it immediately during the contention access period (CAP) using a fuzzy logic algorithm, based on their queue length and implemented in the CSMA/CA algorithm. Therefore, the proposed scheme dynamically changes the CAP length to ensure that nodes can complete its transaction during the same super-frame. Simulation results are done using the network simulator tools (NS-2) and have improved good efficiency regarding the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The mechanism has improved the energy consumption, minimised the packet loss probability, increased the throughput variation in the network and also minimised the average end to end delay.     

一种利用信道侦听的动态TDMA协议

针对TDMA网络节点间业务量不均匀时,会造成信道资源严重浪费的情况,提出了一种利用信道侦听的CS-TDMA协议。该协议在TDMA协议的基础上,节点通过接收到各节点的数据包数量估算相应节点的业务量大小。当某节点时隙剩余时,向其统计中业务量最大的一个节点发送ATS信息,通知该节点占用剩余时隙发送数据,直至时隙结束。仿真结果表明,CS-TDMA协议较TDMA协议在传输时延、吞吐量、数据接收率上均有所提高,尤其在节点间业务量大小不均匀时,时延性能提升更加明显。     

A Low Duty Cycle MAC Protocol for Directional Wireless Sensor Networks

Directional communication in wireless sensor networks minimizes interference and thereby increases reliability and throughput of the network. Hence, directional wireless sensor networks (DWSNs) are fastly attracting the interests of researchers and industry experts around the globe. However, in DWSNs the conventional medium access control protocols face some new challenges including the synchronization among the nodes, directional hidden terminal and deafness problems, etc. For taking the advantages of spatial reusability and increased coverage from directional communications, a low duty cycle directional Medium Access control protocol for mobility based DWSNs, termed as DCD-MAC, is developed in this paper. To reduce energy consumption due to idle listening, duty cycling is extensively used in WSNs. In DCD-MAC, each pair of parent and child sensor nodes performs synchronization with each other before data communication. The nodes in the network schedule their time of data transmissions in such a way that the number of collisions occurred during transmissions from multiple nodes is minimized. The sensor nodes are kept active only when the nodes need to communicate with each other. The DCD-MAC exploits localized information of mobile nodes in a distributed manner and thus it gives weighted fair access of transmission slots to the nodes. As a final point, we have studied the performance of our proposed protocol through extensive simulations in NS-3 and the results show that the DCD-MAC gives better reliability, throughput, end-to-end delay, network lifetime and overhead comparing to the related directional MAC protocols.     

Toward In-Band Self-Organization in Energy-Efficient MAC Protocols for Sensor Networks

This paper presents a self-organizing medium access control (MAC) protocol framework for distributed sensor networks with arbitrary mesh topologies. The novelty of the proposed In-band self-organized MAC (ISOMAC) protocol lies in its in-band control mechanism for exchanging time-division multiple access (TDMA) slot information with distributed MAC scheduling. A fixed-length bitmap vector is used in each packet header for exchanging relative slot timing information across immediate and up to two-hop neighbors. It is shown that, by avoiding explicit timing information exchange, ISOMAC can work without networkwide time synchronization, which can be prohibitive for severely cost-constrained sensor nodes in very large networks. A slot-clustering effect, caused by in-band bitmap constraints, enables ISOMAC to offer better spatial channel reuse compared to traditional distributed TDMA protocols. ISOMAC employs a partial node wake-up and header-only transmission strategy to adjust energy expenditure based on the instantaneous nodal data rate. Both analytical and simulation models have been developed for characterizing the proposed protocol. Results demonstrate that, with in-band bitmap vectors of moderate length, ISOMAC converges reasonably quickly, that is, approximately within a four to eight TDMA frame duration. Also, if the bitmap header duration is restricted within 10 percent of packet duration, then the energy penalty of the in-band information is quite negligible. It is also shown that ISOMAC can be implemented in the presence of network time synchronization, although its performance without synchronization is just marginally worse than that with synchronization.     

Cross-Layer Design for Lifetime Maximization in Interference-Limited Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider the joint optimal design of the physical, medium access control (MAC), and routing layers to maximize the lifetime of energy-constrained wireless sensor networks. The problem of computing lifetime-optimal routing flow, link schedule, and link transmission powers for all active time slots is formulated as a non-linear optimization problem. We first restrict the link schedules to the class of interference-free time division multiple access (TDMA) schedules. In this special case, we formulate the optimization problem as a mixed integerconvex program, which can be solved using standard techniques. Moreover, when the slots lengths are variable, the optimization problem is convex and can be solved efficiently and exactly using interior point methods. For general non-orthogonal link schedules, we propose an iterative algorithm that alternates between adaptive link scheduling and computation of optimal link rates and transmission powers for a fixed link schedule. The performance of this algorithm is compared to other design approaches for several network topologies. The results illustrate the advantages of load balancing, multihop routing, frequency reuse, and interference mitigation in increasing the lifetime of energy-constrained networks. We also briefly discuss computational approaches to extend this algorithm to large networks     

Study of various TDMA schemes for wireless networks in the presenceof deadlines and overhead

The objective of this paper is to determine the minimum system dropping rate (or, equivalently, dropping probability) induced by time division multiple access (TDMA) schemes supporting time-constrained applications with common maximum cell delay tolerance. Expressions are derived for the induced system dropping rate for various TDMA schemes with different overhead and the maximum number of users than can be admitted in the network without violating the maximum dropping rate constraint is determined. The system dropping rate achieved by suboptimal TDMA schemes is compared against the optimal (although ideal) TDMA scheme performance. The performance limiting factors associated with the suboptimal schemes are identified, and the magnitude of their (negative) impact is evaluated. Based on this information it is possible to point to performance improving modifications which should be pursued to the extent permitted by technological constraints. Finally, based on this derivations a network designer may choose the best TDMA scheme-among realizable variations of those considered here-to use in a particular situation     

Random Mobility and Heterogeneity-Aware Hybrid Synchronization for Wireless Sensor Network

Random mobility of a node in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) causes the frequent changes in the network dynamics with increased cost in terms of energy and bandwidth. During data collections and transmission, they need the additional efforts to synchronize and schedule the activities of nodes. A key challenge is to maintain the global clock scale for synchronization of nodes at different levels to minimize the energy consumption and clock skew. It is also difficult to schedule the activities for effective utilization of slots allocated for aggregated data transmission. The paper proposes the Random Mobility and Heterogeneity-aware Hybrid Synchronization Algorithm (MHS) for WSN. The proposed algorithm uses the cluster-tree for efficient synchronization of CH and nodes in the cluster and network, level-by-level. The network consists of three nodes with random mobility and are heterogeneous regarding energy with static sink. All the nodes and CH are synchronized with the notion of the global timescale provided by the sink as a root node. With the random mobility of the node, the network structure frequently changes causing an increase in energy consumption. To mitigate this problem, MHS aggregate data with the notion of a global timescale throughout the network. Also, the hierarchical structure along with pair-wise synchronization reduces the clock skews hence energy consumption. In the second phase of MHS, the aggregated data packets are passed through the scheduled and synchronized slots using TDMA as basic MAC layer protocol to reduce the collision of packets. The results are extended by using the hybrid approach of scheduling and synchronization algorithm on the base protocol. The comparative results show that MHS is energy and bandwidth efficient, with increased throughput and reduced delay as compared with state-of-the-art solutions.     

专用无线采集网络系统设计

本文主要讨论了一种基于TDMA/扩频的固定多跳无线传感器采集网络系统,文章就系统的网络结构,功能框图,部分硬件结构,系统的协议体系以及基于TDMA的信道访问方式等作了简要介绍,列举了系统的优越性,搭建了一个实验平台验证了方案的可行性.并且展望了未来的应用前景以及提出了相应的技术升级方案.     

TDMA scheduling design of multihop packet radio networks based onlatin squares

Many transmission scheduling algorithms have been proposed to maximize spatial reuse and minimize the time division multiple access (TDMA) frame length in multihop packet radio networks. Almost all existing algorithms assume exact network topology information and require recomputations when the network topology changes. In addition, existing work focuses on single channel TDMA systems. In this paper, we propose a multichannel topology-transparent algorithm based on latin squares. The proposed algorithm has the flexibility to allow the growth of the network, i.e., the network can add more mobile nodes without recomputation of transmission schedules for existing nodes. At the same time, a minimum throughput is guaranteed. We analyze the efficiency of this algorithm and examine the topology-transparent characteristics and the sensitivity on design parameters by analytical and simulation techniques     

Reduced‐frame TDMA protocols for wireless sensor networks

Time‐division multiple‐access (TDMA) is a common medium access control paradigm in wireless sensor networks. However, in its traditional form, the TDMA‐based protocols suffer from low channel utilization and high message delay because of a long frame length needed to provide collision‐free transmissions, which is particularly damaging in dense wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we investigate the performance and the energy efficiency of a class of TDMA‐based protocols, called reduced‐frame TDMA, where every TDMA slot is augmented with a short time period dedicated for carrier sense multiple access‐based contention resolution mechanism. Because of their ability to dynamically resolve collisions caused by conflicting slot assignments, the reduced‐frame TDMA protocols can be configured with any frame length, independently of node density. In addition, we present a distributed heuristic slot assignment algorithm that minimizes interslot interference in the presence of limited number of slots per frame. The simulation results indicate that the reduced‐frame TDMA protocols significantly reduce the message delay and increase the maximum throughput without incurring significant penalty in energy efficiency compared with the traditional TDMA scheme. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Access control in wireless sensor networks

Nodes in a sensor network may be lost due to power exhaustion or malicious attacks. To extend the lifetime of the sensor network, new node deployment is necessary. In military scenarios, adversaries may directly deploy malicious nodes or manipulate existing nodes to introduce malicious “new” nodes through many kinds of attacks. To prevent malicious nodes from joining the sensor network, access control is required in the design of sensor network protocols. In this paper, we propose an access control protocol based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for sensor networks. Our access control protocol accomplishes node authentication and key establishment for new nodes. Different from conventional authentication methods based on the node identity, our access control protocol includes both the node identity and the node bootstrapping time into the authentication procedure. Hence our access control protocol cannot only identify the identity of each node but also differentiate between old nodes and new nodes. In addition, each new node can establish shared keys with its neighbors during the node authentication procedure. Compared with conventional sensor network security solutions, our access control protocol can defend against most well-recognized attacks in sensor networks, and achieve better computation and communication performance due to the more efficient algorithms based on ECC than those based on RSA.