Efficient Mac Protocol: Time Slot Shifting MAC

by Paulami Nath & Omkar Choudhury paulami09@gmail.com & omzeppelin@gmail.com National Institute Of Technology

Abstract:
In wireless sensor network nodes have limited energy, so special attention has to be paid for the judicious use of the resource. So for efficient energy usage and prolong network lifetime, efficacious MAC protocols have to be designed . In this paper, design of such a MAC protocol is presented known as time slot shifting MAC protocol, which is energy efficient as well as gives guarantee of low latency. Keywords: Wireless sensor network(WSN), Medium Access Protocol(MAC), TSS(Time slot shifting) But it is true that there is no single protocol which can assure these two qualities under all circumstances. Researches have been going on since the birth of wireless sensor network and so till date numerous protocols have been protocols have been proposed . Of these, several protocols have been applied under several circumstances to meet the demands , also making trade-off between energy consumption and latency at times when it is necessary.

I. Introduction
Wireless sensor network, as the name suggests, is an infrastructure comprising of thousands of sensor nodes spread autonomously in an environment. They have sensing, computing, and communication elements which gives the administrator, the ability to instrument, observe and react to events, phenomenon in specified environment. Energy Efficiency is the main concern for modern times wireless sensor networks. The main challenges which are faced during designing the new technologies for the network are the needs for the nodes to be smart, self-configurable , capable of networking together and the inherent poverty of resources within the nodes themselves. Since sensor nodes have limited energy so to judiciously use them and prolong the network life time , now a days main stress is given on designing efficient Mac Protocols which can suffice the needs of current network system. The two main characteristics the protocol should have are- i) low energy consumption ii) low latency.

MAC Protocols for WSNs In practice, it is very much necessary in many applications to provide guarantees that a network of unattended wireless sensors can remain operational without any replacements for several years. So since the infancy of WSN numerous attempts have been made to design the most suitable MAC protocols which can suffice all the needs of current network system. All the protocols are categorized into two types: i) Contention based MAC Protocols (CSMA carrier sense multiple access): Here the wireless nodes compete among themselves to enter the medium of connectivity (which is the wireless medium in case of WSNs) and the winner node reserves the medium to itself until it finishes its operation.

ii) TDMA(Time division multiple access) Mac Protocols: Here the medium is divided into time slots.Each node knows its time slot when to enter the medium and do its operation. So it is collision free.

Several Challenges faced by MAC Protocols while designing WSNs are: 1. Reliable end-to-end data transmission. 2. Low latency data transmission. 3. Scalability and Adaptability. 4. Energy efficient consumption in wireless nodes.

The sources for wastage of energy in most MAC Protocols are: i) ii) iii) iv) v) vi) Collision of data packets Idle listening of the medium Overhearing of unnecessary data packets Control packet overheads Over emitting of data packets Transition from one state to another ie sleep, idle, receive and transmit.

scheme, named as TEEM (Traffic aware, Energy Efficient MAC) protocol .The proposed TEEM is originally inspired by S-MAC. The protocol achieves energy efficient consumption by utilizing traffic information of each node, achieving a significant decrease in power consumption. Two important modifications TEEM protocol makes over the existing S-MAC protocol: firstly by having all nodes turn off their radios much earlier when no data packet transfer is expected to occur in the networks, and secondly by eliminating communication of a separate RTS control packet even when data traffic is likely to occur. Still it lacks on latency efficiency it subjected to energy efficient operation. PMAC:- Tao Zheng et al, proposes a new MAC protocol, called PMAC, where the sleep-wakeup times of the sensor nodes are adaptively determined The schedules are decided based on a nodes own traffic and that of its neighbors. Experimental results show that in comparison to SMAC, PMAC achieves more power savings under light loads, and higher throughput under heavier traffic loads. The improved performance of PMAC suggests that pattern exchange is a promising framework for improving the energy efficiency of the MAC protocols used in sensor networks. Because of the (pattern) approach PMAC has the computation overhead by using Markov chain approach as a probability check. TA-MAC:-Sangheon Pack et al, proposed a task aware MAC protocol for WSNs [10]. As a kind of cross layering approach, TA-MAC protocol determines the channel access probability depending on a nodes and its neighbor nodes traffic loads through the interaction with the data dissemination protocol. TA-MAC protocol can reduce energy consumption and improve the throughput by eliminating unnecessary collisions. The TA-MAC protocol is feasible because it can be integrated with other energy efficient MAC protocol (e.g., SMAC). This is because the TA-MAC protocol focuses on the determination of channel access probability that is orthogonal to the previous MAC protocols for WSNs. R-MAC:-Shu Du et al, another approach for efficient MAC protocol called RMAC (the Routing enhanced MAC protocol), that exploits cross-layer routing information in order to avoid the common problems without sacrificing energy efficiency. Most importantly, RMAC can deliver a data packet multiple hops in a single operational cycle. During the SLEEP period in RMAC, a relaying node for a data packet goes to sleep first and then intelligently

So all the above factors have to be taken into consideration before designing the protocol so that proper balance can be achieved among all.

II. Related Work

i. Contention Based MAC Protocols:

S-MAC:- Wei et al, presented sensor-MAC (SMAC), a contention based MAC protocol designed explicitly for wireless sensor networks. It achieves efficient energy consumption by using a scheme of periodic listen and sleep reduces energy consumption by avoiding idle listening. S-MAC has a problem of latency because of periodic listen and sleep scheme which is fixed depending on the duty cycle. T-MAC:- Tijs van dam et al, introduced T-MAC, a contention based Medium Access Control protocol for wireless sensor Networks. To handle load variations in time and location T-MAC introduces an adaptive duty cycle in a novel way: by dynamically ending the active part of it. This reduces the amount of energy wasted on idle listening, in which nodes wait for potentially incoming messages, while still maintaining a reasonable throughput. T-MAC uses TA(time out) packet to end the active part when there is no data to send/receive on the node. It compromises between energy efficient consumption and latency efficient throughput because of the scheme of burst data sending. TEEM:- Changsu suh et al, focused on the contention-based MAC protocol and present a novel

wake up when its upstream node has the data packet ready to transmit to it. After the data packet is received by this relaying node, it can also immediately forward the packet to its next downstream node. The mechanism is implemented using a packet called (Pioneer) this packet travels to all sensors in downstream to synchronize the dutycycles of the nodes to guarantee a multi-hop packet delivery. This protocol achieved latency efficient operation. PS-MAC:-Sung-Chan Choi et al, proposed PS-MAC (Probability Sensor-MAC), a time slotted MAC protocol like S-MAC but unlike S-MAC in which all nodes have the same synchronized and periodic listen and sleep cycle, in this protocol, different transmitter and receiver node pairs have asynchronous and non-periodic listen and sleep schedules .Each sensor node uses a pseudo-number generator and determines its listen and sleep schedule randomly based on its pre-wakeup probability and seed. Yet it could produce over emitting problem because of the asynchronous probability so to avoid this problem the neighboring nodes exchange their pre-wakeup probabilities and seed numbers. The protocol provided an energy efficient operation with a decent throughput because of asynchronous scheduling which out-performs S-MAC on heavy load situation. SEA-MAC:-Miguel A. Erazo et al, developed SMAC to SEA-MAC(Simple Energy Aware), a protocol aims for energy efficient operation for WSNs .The protocol assumes only the base station node has the time synchronization schedule.Sensor nodes suppose to be active only when there is a sample to be taken from the environment which decreases the duty cycle of the node and preserves energy. O-MAC:-Another approach is produced by Farid Nait-Abdesselam et al, O-MAC a protocol which aims to decrease energy consuming and provide high throughput in WSNs Its design is mainly based on two major ideas .First, it adopts a locally scheduled algorithm on a CSMA protocol which will prevent possible collisions among the neighboring contending nodes. Second, it allows the nodes in the vicinity of a transmission and that are not concerned by the data being sent the possibility to sleep during the duration of one transmission and to inform their neighbors of their ultimate entry into sleep mode to prevent them from sending data wastefully during the sleep period. Still this protocol has packet overhead because it has to utilize another to control packets OTS (Order To Sleep) and NTS (Node To Sleep).

ii. TDMA based MAC Protocols: The main advantages of a TDMA-protocol are the following: 1. Packet loss due to collisions is absent because two nodes do not transmit in the same slot. Although packet loss may occur due to other reasons like interference, loss of signal strength etc. 2. No contention mechanism is required for a node to start sensing its packets since the slots are pre assigned to each node. No extra control overhead packets for contention are required. RT-MAC:-Anirudha Sahoo et al, produced RTMAC, a TDMA based MAC protocol that can provide delay guarantee .TDMA based MAC protocols suffers from latency because of the assigning of time slots which takes much time relatively because of the number of sensor nodes deployed. Yet RTMAC can overcome this by reutilizing the connection channel between two successive channel accesses of a sensor node. And RT-MAC allows sensors to go to sleep which preserves energy. Thu it provides delay guarantee, but it encompasses a lot of calculation that could exhaust the sensor node itself in some cases like clock drifting problem.

III. Our Work

TDMA based MAC protocol ER-MAC (Energy and Rate) is one of the mostly used protocols since it has the inherent advantage of avoiding extra energy wastage. ER-MAC uses the concept of periodic listen and sleep. A sensor node switches off its radio and wakes up only in its assigned time slot so it saves energy when it has data to send. But its main disadvantage is that when it has no data to send in its assigned time slot then also it wakes up and do idle listening. As a result energy is wasted. Now a days where energy is a very scarce resource, we cannot afford to waste a little bit of energy during data transmission. We try to achieve the highest precision level possible.

if a node crosses the threshold but does not utilize the entire time then the left over time in that part will be wasted but the rest of the parts will be transmitted. Since 20%nodes are given smaller time slots , the network speed remaining same, for them data might get queued up in the buffer because they are not getting enough time to send the data. Now from the 80% nodes if they do not use their time slots completely then these time slots are passed to these 20% nodes who are in need of more time so as to send more data and empty the buffer as soon as possible. As a result of this method, time slots are not wasted and at the same time more data is flowing through the network ie energy efficiency goes up as well as the latency of the network goes down.

Fig : Model of fixed time slot

Here if we consider 10 nodes then they are given 10 equal time slots of say 6 secs, so the data will be transmitted for a period of 60 secs in one cycle. Now if suppose node 2,5 and node 8 are idle after sometime then in each cycle out of 60 secs 18 secs of energy will be wasted which we cannot afford. So keeping this mind, we propose an enhanced Mac Protocol. Basically it is the modification of ERMAC called time slots shifting MAC. Here we assign a bit to each time slot and then divide each time slots into 3 parts. If the bit is 1, it means the node has data to send, otherwise if 0 then the node has nothing to send . Atfirst when time slots are assigned to nodes by the cluster head, then around 80% of nodes are assigned large time slots as required by the data flow and rest 20% are given comparatively smaller time slots. All the bits are set to 1. Now after sometime when some of the nodes are getting idle, that is they have no data to send then to solve the problem of wastage of energy because of the unused time slots, what we do is that we shift the time slots to the next node waking it up on demand and give the time slot left unused as well as its own time slot, so that if it has more data to send which might be queued up in its buffer. Now if it does not require the entire time slot then it passes the left over time slot to the next node by demand wake up and the process continues. Now since the time slots are again divided into 3 parts, each part has its own threshold,
Fig : New model of time slot shifting

Now here 8 nodes are given time slots of 6 secs and 2 nodes are given 3 secs time slots. Now is node 2, 3 and 5 are idle follow process occurs. For checking the bit and demand wake up it requires negligible amount of time . For 80% nodes, time slot is divided into 3 parts apart from the bit each of 2 secs and the 20% nodes have 3 parts with each of 1 sec.

At first after first node has finished transmitting then for second node bit checking is done and if it is 0,then cluster head checks the bit of 3rd node, if it is 1 then it wakes up the node on demand and assigns it two slots of 6+6=12 secs. Now it can send all the data that may be queued up in the buffer. It may not require the entire time slot. Now if it transmits for say 8secs then the remaining two parts of the 2nd time slot will be given to the next node but if it transmits for 9secs then one one part will be shifted to the next causing a wasting of one sec in the middle. Moving in this way , now the 4th node has its own time slot plus the extra slots for its data. Now again if the 5th node is idle, its time slot will be passed to the next node which may or may require the entire time slots available to it. Suppose the time required is as follows for 10 nodes. Node no. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Available time 6 6 6+6=12 6+2+2=10/6+2=8 6+2=8/6 6+8=14/6+6=12 6+6=12/6+4=10 6+6=12/6+4=10 3+12=15/3+10=13 3+3=6/3+2=5 Used(unit sec) 6 idle 8/9 7 idle 8 5 idle 11 5

V. Conclusion
MAC Protocols are very important for efficient energy conservation and providing low latency in wireless sensor network. Our proposed protocol suffice these needs and makes a trade off keeping all the factors in mind which influences data transmission in WSNs. Still a lot of work is left to be done. Our future work will be to enhance our protocol and make it better so that it is more energy efficient and provides low latency guarantee.

VI. Bibliography
1.Wei Ye, John Heidemann, Deborah Estrin An Energy-Efficient MAC protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks, USC/ISI TECHNICAL REPORT ISITR-543, SEPTEMBER 2001. 2.Rajgopal Kannan, Ram Kalidini, S. S. Iyengar Energy and rate based MAC protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks SIGMOD Record, Vol.32, No.4, December 2003. 3.Tijs Van Dam, Keon Langendoen An Adaptive Energy-Efficeint MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks,SenSys03, November 5-7, 2003. 4. Xiao-Hui Lin, Yu-Kwong Kwok, On Channel Adaptive Energy Management in wireless Sensor Networks, ICPPW 2005, IEEE. 5.Tao Zheng, Sridhar Radhakrishnan, Venkatesh Sarangan,PMAC: An adaptive energy-efficient Mac protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks, IPDPS 2005, IEEE. 6.Changsu Suh, Young-Bae Ko, A Traffic Aware, Energy Efficient MAC protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE2005. 7.Sangheon Pack, Jaeyoung Choi, Taekyoung Kwon and Yanghee Choi, TA-MAC: Task Aware MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks, Vehicular Technology Conference, 2006. VTC 2006-Spring. IEEE 63rd. 8. Sung-Chan Choi, Jang-Won Lee, Yeonsoo Kim, Hakjin Chong, An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol with Random Listen-Sleep Schedule for Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE 2007. 9. Shu Du, Amit Kumar Saha, David B. Johnson, RMAC: A Routing-Enhanced Duty-Cycle MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks, INFOCOM

So we can see from the table one of the possibilities of wastage of time slots. Wastage=1(3rd node)+1(4th node)+1(th node)+1(9th node)+1(10th node) = 5 units. Delay = 5 units(say) Therefore total wastage = 10 units. Whereas in the previous case it is 18 units.

IV. Discussions
So we can see that energy wastage is much less here and the delay is within the tolerable limit.

2007. 26th IEEE International Computer Communications. IEEE.

Conference on

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