Ultra-low duty cycle MAC with scheduled channel polling

ABSTRACT

Energy is a critical resource in sensor networks. MAC protocols such as S-MAC and T-MAC coordinate sleep schedules to reduce energy consumption. Recently, lowpower listening (LPL) approaches such as WiseMAC and B-MAC exploit very brief polling of channel activity combined with long preambles before each transmission, saving energy particularly during low network utilization. Synchronization cost, either explicitly in scheduling, or implicitly in long preambles, limits all these protocols to duty cycles of 1-2%. We demonstrate that ultra-low duty cycles of 0.1% and below are possible with a new MAC protocol called scheduled channel polling (SCP). This work prompts three new contributions: First, we establish optimal configurations for both LPL and SCP under fixed conditions, developing a lower bound of energy consumption. Under these conditions, SCP can extend lifetime of a network by a factor of 3-6 times over LPL. Second, SCP is designed to adapt well to variable traffic. LPL is optimized for known, periodic traffic, and long preambles become very costly when traffic varies. In one experiment, SCP reduces energy consumption by a factor of 10 under bursty traffic. We also show how SCP adapts to heavy traffic and streams data in multi-hop networks, reducing latency by 85% and energy by 95% at 9 hops. Finally, we show that SCP can operate effectively on recent hardware such as 802.15.4 radios. In fact, power consumption of SCP decreases with faster radios, but that of LPL increases.

REFERENCES

• 1: Alberto Cerpa , Jeremy Elson , Michael Hamilton , Jerry Zhao , Deborah Estrin , Lewis Girod, Habitat monitoring: application driver for wireless communications technology, Workshop on Data communication in Latin America and the Caribbean, p.20-41, April 2001, San Jose, Costa Rica [doi>10.1145/371626.371720]
• 2: Amre El-Hoiydi, Spatial TDMA and CSMA with Preamble Sampling for Low Power Ad Hoc Wireless Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the Seventh International Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC'02), p.685, July 01-04, 2002
• 3: A. El-Hoiydi , J.-D. Decotignie , C. Enz , E. Le Roux, Poster abstract: wiseMAC, an ultra low power MAC protocol for the wiseNET wireless sensor network, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 05-07, 2003, Los Angeles, California, USA [doi>10.1145/958491.958531]
• 4: Saurabh Ganeriwal , Deepak Ganesan , Hohyun Shim , Vlasios Tsiatsis , Mani B. Srivastava, Estimating clock uncertainty for efficient duty-cycling in sensor networks, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 02-04, 2005, San Diego, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1098918.1098933]
• 5: G. P. Halkes , T. van Dam , K. G. Langendoen, Comparing energy-saving MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks, Mobile Networks and Applications, v.10 n.5, p.783-791, October 2005 [doi>10.1145/1160143.1160161]
• 6: Wendi Rabiner Heinzelman , Anantha Chandrakasan , Hari Balakrishnan, Energy-Efficient Communication Protocol for Wireless Microsensor Networks, Proceedings of the 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences-Volume 8, p.8020, January 04-07, 2000
• 7: Jason L. Hill , David E. Culler, Mica: A Wireless Platform for Deeply Embedded Networks, IEEE Micro, v.22 n.6, p.12-24, November 2002 [doi>10.1109/MM.2002.1134340 ]
• 8: Jason Hill , Robert Szewczyk , Alec Woo , Seth Hollar , David Culler , Kristofer Pister, System architecture directions for networked sensors, Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, p.93-104, November 2000, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
• 9: Chipcon Inc. CC1000 data sheet. http://www.chipcon.com/.
• 10: Chipcon Inc. CC2420 data sheet. http://www.chipcon.com/.
• 11: Crossbow Technology Inc. Mica2 data sheet. http://www.xbow.com/.
• 12: Jing Li , Georgios Y. Lazarou, A bit-map-assisted energy-efficient MAC scheme for wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the third international symposium on Information processing in sensor networks, April 26-27, 2004, Berkeley, California, USA [doi>10.1145/984622.984631]
• 13: Yuan Li, Wei Ye, and John Heidemann. Energy and latency control in low duty cycle MAC protocols. In Proceedings of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, New Orleans, LA, USA, March 2005.
• 14: Gang Lu, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, and Cauligi Raghavendra. An adaptive energy-efficient and low-latency mac for data gathering in sensor networks. In Workshop on Energy-Efficient Wireless Communications and Networks (EWCN '04), held in conjunction with the IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC), April 2004.
• 15: Alan Mainwaring , David Culler , Joseph Polastre , Robert Szewczyk , John Anderson, Wireless sensor networks for habitat monitoring, Proceedings of the 1st ACM international workshop on Wireless sensor networks and applications, September 28-28, 2002, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/570738.570751]
• 16: LAN MAN Standards Committee of the IEEE Computer Society. Wireless LAN medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) specification. IEEE, New York, NY, USA, IEEE Std 802.11-1999 edition, 1999.
• 17: Joseph Polastre , Jason Hill , David Culler, Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 03-05, 2004, Baltimore, MD, USA [doi>10.1145/1031495.1031508]
• 18: Joseph Polastre , Jonathan Hui , Philip Levis , Jerry Zhao , David Culler , Scott Shenker , Ion Stoica, A unifying link abstraction for wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 02-04, 2005, San Diego, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1098918.1098928]
• 19: Venkatesh Rajendran , Katia Obraczka , J. J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, Energy-efficient collision-free medium access control for wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 05-07, 2003, Los Angeles, California, USA [doi>10.1145/958491.958513]
• 20: Injong Rhee , Ajit Warrier , Mahesh Aia , Jeongki Min, Z-MAC: a hybrid MAC for wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 02-04, 2005, San Diego, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1098918.1098929]
• 21: Curt Schurgers , Vlasios Tsiatsis , Saurabh Ganeriwal , Mani Srivastava, Optimizing Sensor Networks in the Energy-Latency-Density Design Space, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, v.1 n.1, p.70-80, January 2002 [doi>10.1109/TMC.2002.1011060 ]
• 22: Suresh Singh , C. S. Raghavendra, PAMAS—power aware multi-access protocol with signalling for ad hoc networks, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, v.28 n.3, p.5-26, July 1998 [doi>10.1145/293927.293928]
• 23: Katayoun Sohrabi and Gregory J. Pottie. Performance of a novel self organization protocol for wireless ad hoc sensor networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE 50th Vehicular Technology Conference, pages 1222--1226, 1999.
• 24: Tijs van Dam , Koen Langendoen, An adaptive energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, November 05-07, 2003, Los Angeles, California, USA [doi>10.1145/958491.958512]
• 25: L. van Hoesel and P. Havinga. A lightweight medium access protocol (LMAC) for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), pages 55--60, Berkeley, CA, February 2004. April.
• 26: Wei Ye, John Heidemann, and Deborah Estrin. An energy-efficient mac protocol for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE Infocom, pages 1567--1576, New York, NY, June 2002. IEEE.
• 27: Wei Ye , John Heidemann , Deborah Estrin, Medium access control with coordinated adaptive sleeping for wireless sensor networks, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.12 n.3, p.493-506, June 2004 [doi>10.1109/TNET.2004.828953]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.2 Network Protocols

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Performance attributes

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
energy efficiency, medium access control, scheduling, ultra-low duty cycle, wireless sensor networks