1

MAC Layer Protocols for

Sensor Networks
Prasun Sinha
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Ohio State University

April 25
th
, 2007
(some slides adapted from authors presentations found on the Internet)
2
Introduction
Wireless sensor network
Special ad hoc wireless network
Large number of nodes w/ sensors & actuators
Battery-powered nodes energy efficiency
Unplanned deployment self-organization
Node density & topology change robustness
Sensor-net applications
Nodes cooperate for a common task
In-network data processing
3
Some Applications of Sensor Networks
Data Collection Networks
Sensing Movement of Glaciers
Environment Monitoring
Habitat Monitoring
Habitat Monitoring of Storm Petrels in Great Duck Island
Microsofts Effort to put every sensor on the web

Event Triggered Networks
Structural Monitoring
Golden Gate Bridge
Precision Agriculture
Oregon and British Columbia Vineyards
Condition based Maintenance
Hardware Manufacturing facilities
Military Applications
Environment Monitoring
Poisonous gas, pollutants etc.
National Asset Protection
Coastline, Border Patrol, Roadways, Oil/gas pipelines, Secure facilities

4
Talk Outline
SMAC: http://www.isi.edu/~weiye/pub/smac_ton.pdf
Medium Access Control With Coordinated Adaptive Sleeping for Wireless
Sensor Networks, Wei Ye, John Heidemann, and Deborah Estrin, Transactions
on Networking, 2004, (also Infocom 2002)


BMAC: http://www.polastre.com/papers/sensys04-bmac.pdf
Versatile Low Power Media Access for Wireless Sensor Networks, Joseph
Polastre, Jason Hill and David Culler, ACM SENSYS 2004


CMAC: http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~prasun/publications/conf/secon07-cmac.pdf
CMAC: An Energy Efficient MAC Layer Protocol Using Convergent Packet
Forwarding for Wireless Sensor Networks, Sha Liu, Kai-Wei Fan and Prasun
Sinha, IEEE SECON 2007



5
Medium Access Control in Sensor Nets
Important attributes of MAC protocols
1. Collision avoidance
2. Energy efficiency
3. Scalability in node density
4. Latency
5. Fairness
6. Throughput
7. Bandwidth utilization
Primary
Secondary
6
Major sources of energy waste (cont.)
Idle listening
Long idle time when no sensing event happens
Collisions
Control overhead
Overhearing
We try to reduce energy consumption from
all above sources
Combine benefits of TDMA + contention
protocols
Energy Efficiency in MAC
Common to all
wireless networks
Dominant in sensor

nets
7
Sensor-MAC (S-MAC) Design
Tradeoffs
Major components in S-MAC
Periodic listen and sleep
Collision avoidance
Overhearing avoidance
Massage passing
Latency
Fairness
Energy
8
Periodic Listen and Sleep
Problem: Idle listening consumes significant
energy
Solution: Periodic listen and sleep
Turn off radio when sleeping
Reduce duty cycle to ~ 10% (200ms on/2s off)
sleep
listen listen sleep
Latency
Energy
9
Periodic Listen and Sleep
Schedules can differ
Prefer neighboring nodes have same schedule
easy broadcast & low control overhead
Border nodes:
two schedules
broadcast twice
Node 1
Node 2
sleep listen listen
sleep
sleep listen listen
sleep
Schedule 2
Schedule 1
10
Periodic Listen and Sleep
Schedule Synchronization
Remember neighbors schedules
to know when to send to them
Each node broadcasts its schedule every few
periods of sleeping and listening
Re-sync when receiving a schedule update
Schedule packets also serve as beacons for new
nodes to join a neighborhood
11
Collision Avoidance
Problem: Multiple senders want to talk
Options: Contention vs. TDMA
Solution: Similar to IEEE 802.11 ad hoc
mode (DCF)
Physical and virtual carrier sense
Randomized backoff time
RTS/CTS for hidden terminal problem
RTS/CTS/DATA/ACK sequence
12
Overhearing Avoidance
Problem: Receive packets destined to others
Solution: Sleep when neighbors talk
Basic idea from PAMAS (Singh, Raghavendra 1998)
But we only use in-channel signaling
Who should sleep?
All immediate neighbors of sender and receiver
How long to sleep?
The duration field in each packet informs other
nodes the sleep interval
13
Message Passing
Problem: Sensor net in-network processing
requires entire message
Solution: Dont interleave different messages
Long message is fragmented & sent in burst
RTS/CTS reserve medium for entire message
Fragment-level error recovery ACK
extend Tx time and re-transmit immediately
Other nodes sleep for whole message time
Fairness
Energy
Msg-level latency
14
Msg Passing vs. 802.11 fragmentation
S-MAC message passing
RTS 21
...
...
Data 19
ACK 18 CTS 20
Data 17
ACK 16
Data 1
ACK 0
RTS 3
...
...
Data 3
ACK 2 CTS 2
Data 3
ACK 2
Data 1
ACK 0
Fragmentation in IEEE 802.11
No indication of entire time other nodes keep listening
If ACK is not received, give up Tx fairness

15
Implementation on Testbed Nodes
Platform
Motes (UC Berkeley)
8-bit CPU at 4MHz,
8KB flash, 512B RAM
916MHz radio
TinyOS: event-driven
Compared MAC modules
1. IEEE 802.11-like protocol w/o sleeping
2. Message passing with overhearing avoidance
3. S-MAC (2 + periodic listen/sleep)
16
Experiments
Topology and measured energy consumption
on source nodes
Source 1
Source 2
Sink 1
Sink 2
Each source node sends
10 messages
Each message has 400B
in 10 fragments
Measure total energy over
time to send all messages
0 2 4 6 8 10
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
1600
1800
Average energy consumption in the source nodes
Message inter-arrival period (second)
E
n
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(
m
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802.11-like protocol
Overhearing avoidance
S-MAC
17
S-MAC Conclusions
S-MAC offers significant energy efficiency
over always-listening MAC protocols
S-MAC can function at 10% duty cycle
18
Talk Outline
SMAC: http://www.isi.edu/~weiye/pub/smac_ton.pdf
Medium Access Control With Coordinated Adaptive Sleeping for Wireless
Sensor Networks, Wei Ye, John Heidemann, and Deborah Estrin, Transactions
on Networking, 2004, (also Infocom 2002)


BMAC: http://www.polastre.com/papers/sensys04-bmac.pdf
Versatile Low Power Media Access for Wireless Sensor Networks,
Joseph Polastre, Jason Hill and David Culler, ACM SENSYS 2004


CMAC: http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~prasun/publications/conf/secon07-cmac.pdf
CMAC: An Energy Efficient MAC Layer Protocol Using Convergent Packet
Forwarding for Wireless Sensor Networks, Sha Liu, Kai-Wei Fan and Prasun
Sinha, IEEE SECON 2007



19
BMAC Objectives
Information sharing with higher layers
Control and reconfiguration of link protocol
Tradeoffs in link protocols
20
B-MAC Design
Principles
Reconfigurable MAC
protocol
Flexible control
Hooks for sub-primitives
Backoff/Timeouts
Duty Cycle
Acknowledgements
Feedback to higher
protocols
Minimal implementation
Minimal state

Primary Goals
Low Power Operation
Effective Collision Avoidance
Simple/Predicable Operation
Small Code Size
Tolerant to Changing
RF/Networking Conditions
Scalable to Large Number of
Nodes
Implementation is on Mica2
motes with CC1000

21
B-MAC Link Protocol Interaction
Reconfiguration and control of link layer protocol parameters
Acknowledgements, Backoff/Timeouts, Power Management,

Ability to choose tradeoffs knobs
Fairness, Latency, Energy Consumption, Reliability

Power consumption estimation through analytical and empirical
models
Feedback to network protocols
Lifetime estimation

Mechanisms to achieve network protocols goals

22
Low Power Listening (LPL)
Higher level communication scheduling
Energy Cost = RX + TX + Listen
Start by minimizing the listen cost
Example of a typical low level
protocol mechanism
Periodically
wake up, sample channel, sleep
Properties
Wakeup time fixed
Check Time between wakeups variable
Preamble length matches wakeup interval
Overhear all data packets in cell
Duty cycle depends on number of neighbors
and cell traffic
RX
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TX
sleep sleep sleep
sleep sleep sleep
Node 2
Node 1
time
time
23
Effect of Neighborhood Size
Neighborhood Size affects amount of
traffic in a cell
Network protocols typically keep track of
neighborhood size
Bigger Neighborhood More traffic

0 20 40 60 80 100
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
200
Neighborhood size
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Expected Lifetime Contour
0
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7
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5 2
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0 20 40 60 80 100
0
0.01
0.02
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0.05
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0.07
0.08
0.09
0.1
Number of neighboring nodes
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200ms check interval
100ms check interval
50ms check interval
25ms check interval
10ms check interval
Effect of neighborhood size on node duty cycle
24
B-MAC Performance
Experimental Setup:
n nodes send as quickly as
possible to saturate the
channel
B-MAC never worse than
traditional approach
Often much better
Flexible configuration yields
efficient:
Reliable transport (Acks)
Hidden Terminal support
(RTS-CTS)
0 5 10 15 20
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
14000
16000
0 5 10 15 20
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
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0.8
0.9
1
Throughput of a congested channel
Number of nodes
P
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o
f

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C
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y
B-MAC
B-MAC w/ ACK
B-MAC w/ RTS-CTS
S-MAC unicast
S-MAC broadcast
Channel Capacity
T
h
r
o
u
g
h
p
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t

(
b
p
s
)
Protocol ROM RAM
B-MAC 3046 166
B-MAC w/ ACK 3340 168
B-MAC w/ Duty Cycling 4092 170
B-MAC w/ DC & ACK 4386 172
S-MAC 6274 516
7
8
9
10
1
6
5
4
3
2
0
7
8
9
10
1
6
5
4
3
2
0
topology
25
Fragmentation Support

S-MAC
RTS-CTS Fragmentation Support
B-MAC w/app control
Network protocol sends initial data packet with
number of fragments pending
Disable backoff & LPL for rest of fragments
Measure energy
consumption at C
(bottleneck node)
Minimizing power relies
on controlling link layer
primitives

0 50 100 150 200 250
0
0.05
0.1
0.15
0.2
0.25
0.3
0.35
0.4
Fragment size (bytes)
E
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p
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(
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Mean energy consumption per byte (100 second sample period)
B-MAC w/ no app control
B-MAC w/ app control
S-MAC
T-MAC (simulated)
Optimal Schedule
0 50 100 150 200 250
0
0.05
0.1
0.15
0.2
0.25
0.3
0.35
0.4
Fragment size (bytes)
E
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p
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(
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Mean energy consumption per byte (10 second sample period)
B-MAC w/ no app control
B-MAC w/ app control
S-MAC
T-MAC (simulated)
Optimal Schedule
A
B
C
E
D
10 packets every 10 seconds
10 packets every 100 seconds
26
BMAC Conclusions
Coordination with higher protocols is essential for
long lived operation
Feedback allows protocols to make informed
decisions
27
Talk Outline
SMAC: http://www.isi.edu/~weiye/pub/smac_ton.pdf
Medium Access Control With Coordinated Adaptive Sleeping for Wireless
Sensor Networks, Wei Ye, John Heidemann, and Deborah Estrin, Transactions
on Networking, 2004, (also Infocom 2002)

BMAC: http://www.polastre.com/papers/sensys04-bmac.pdf
Versatile Low Power Media Access for Wireless Sensor Networks, Joseph
Polastre, Jason Hill and David Culler, ACM SENSYS 2004


CMAC: http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~prasun/publications/conf/secon07-
cmac.pdf
CMAC: An Energy Efficient MAC Layer Protocol Using Convergent Packet
Forwarding for Wireless Sensor Networks, Sha Liu, Kai-Wei Fan and
Prasun Sinha, IEEE SECON 2007



28
Existing MAC Layer Approaches
Synchronized Solutions
SMAC, TMAC, DMAC

Unsynchronized Solutions
BMAC, GeRaF
29
Synchronized Approaches
Unnecessary power consumption on
synchronization message exchanges
Can be improved if synchronization is infrequent
Can not achieve very low duty cycles
10% level
30
Unsynchronized Approaches - BMAC
Long Preamble Approach





Wasteful if the receiver wakes up early
Sender
Receiver
Sleep Long Preamble
Sleep Receiving Preamble
Packet
Packet
31
Our Approach - CMAC
Unsynchronized Duty Cycling
Flow Initialization
Aggressive RTS
Anycasting for Packet Forwarding
Flow Stabilization
Convergent Packet Forwarding
32
CMAC: Aggressive RTS
Aggressive RTS
Sender
Receiver
Sleep RTS
Sleep RX
Packet
Packet Sleep
Sleep RTS RTS RX
CTS
33
CMAC: Aggressive RTS
(Double Channel Check)
The receiver only needs to check if the channel is busy after
waking up
Check the channel twice to avoid missing activities
Time between the two checks
Larger than inter-RTS separation
Smaller than RTS duration


RTS RTS
Channel check
RTS RTS
Channel check
RTS RTS
Channel check
(a) (b)
(c)
(shouldnt
happen)
34
CMAC: Anycasting
Anycast Packet Forwarding
Exploits network density
Nodes other than the target receiver may
wake up earlier
can make some progress toward the sink
35
Contention Among Anycast Receivers
Anycast to nodes which are
awake
closer to the destination
More than one potential participants
Nodes closer to the sink send CTSs earlier
36
Contention Among Anycast Receivers
Anycast candidate prioritization

Canceled RTS
CTS
RTS Sender
CTS slot
Canceled CTS
mini-slot
Node in R
1
Node in R
1
Node in R
2
Node in R
3
Canceled CTS
Canceled CTS
37
CMAC: Convergent Forwarding

Anycast has higher overhead than unicast
Nodes stay awake for a short duration after
receiving a packet
For how long?
Switch from anycast to unicast if
Node is able to communicate with a node in R1
Cannot find a better next hop than current one

38
Active nodes
Sleeping nodes
Unicast links
Anycast links
Time 1 Time 2 Time 3
CMAC: Convergent Forwarding Illustration
39
Experiments
Testbed: Kansei Testbed
7 x 15 XSM nodes
Metrics
Normalized Energy Consumption
Average energy consumption to deliver one packet
Throughput: Number of packets received by sink
Latency
Scenarios:
Static Event
Moving Event
40
Experimental Results: Static Scenario

Sink is at one corner of the network
The node that is diagonally opposite to sink sends data
to the sink
Vary data rates
41
Experimental Results: Moving Event

One node generates data at any point for the sink
The node generating data (event) moves along one
side of the network that does not include the sink.
Vary moving speeds
42
CMAC Conclusion

CMAC supports high throughput, low latency and
consumes less energy than existing solutions.

CMACs performance difference from existing
approaches increases with speed of the moving event.

43
Thanks for your attention!


For more information on my research
please check my webpage at
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~prasun