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Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 4, Issue 6, June 2014)
Abstract Recent advancement in micro-electromechanical systems (mems) have enabled the development of
Wireless sensor Network (WSN) which is gaining popularity
day by day and is used in wide range of applications. The
sensor nodes that constitute WSN have several constraints like
limited battery power, memory constraint, limited bandwidth
etc. Therefore designing an efficient MAC layer protocol is a
challenging task. TDMA-based MAC protocols can avoid
collisions, overhearing and idle listening and therefore energy
efficient. In this paper, we firstly describe a brief account of
the factors influencing WSN MAC design. Then, we describe
several TDMA-based MAC protocols both centralized and
distributed which are proposed so far for wireless sensor
network.
Keywords MAC Layer, Scheduling, Time Division
Multiple Access (TDMA), Wireless Sensor Network (WSN).
I. INTRODUCTION
Recent technological advances have enabled the
development of low cost, low power & multifunctional
sensor devices. These autonomous devices with integrated
sensing, processing, and communication capabilities are
called sensor nodes. A sensor node is an electronic device
that is capable of detecting environmental conditions such
as temperature, sound, or the presence of certain objects.
Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) typically consists of a
large number of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to
monitor certain environmental and physical phenomenon
and cooperate with each other to perform the designated
task and send the information to the Base Station (BS) or
the Access Point (AP).
Medium access control (MAC) is one of the critical
issues in the design of wireless sensor networks. As in
most wireless networks, collision, which is caused by two
nodes sending data at the same time over the same
transmission medium, is a great concern in WSNs. To
address this problem, a sensor network must employ a
MAC protocol to arbitrate access to the shared medium in
order to avoid data collision from different nodes and at the
same time to fairly and efficiently share the bandwidth
resources among multiple sensor nodes.
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C. Latency
Latency refers to the time-delay between the time when
a packet is sent by the sender and the time when that packet
is successfully received by the receiver. In case of sensor
network application with stringent latency requirements (e.
g., real - time monitoring of bush fires), the detected event
must be reported to the sink node in real time so that the
appropriate action could be taken.
D. Channel Utilization
This reflects how well the entire bandwidth of the
channel is utilized in communication. Bandwidth is a
valuable resource in wireless communication. So, the MAC
protocols designed for WSN should maximize the
utilization of this scared resource.
E. Throughput
Throughput refers to the amount of data successfully
transferred from a sender to a receiver in a given time. This
is usually measured in bits or bytes per second. Similar to
latency, the importance of throughput depends on different
applications.
F. Fairness
Fairness refers to the ability of different sensor nodes in
the network to equally share a common transmission
channel among them. As the nodes in WSN cooperate with
each other to accomplish a single common task, it is
important not to achieve per-node fairness, but to ensure
the quality of service for the whole task.
A. Energy-efficiency
As the sensor nodes are battery powered, it is almost
impossible to change or recharge the batteries of the nodes.
The radio is the major consumer of energy in many
hardware platforms.
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1) Self- Organizing Medium Access Control: Selforganizing medium access control for sensor networks
(SMACS) [7] is a distributed MAC protocol which enables
a collection of nodes to discover their neighbors and
establish schedules for communicating with them without
the need for any local or global master nodes. In SMACS,
each sensor node is able to turn its radio on and off, and
tune the carrier frequency to different bands as per
requirements.
The number of available bands is relatively large. In
order to form a flat topology, the neighbor discovery and
channel assignment phases are combined. A channel is
assigned to a link immediately once the existence of the
link is discovered. Therefore, by the time all nodes hear
from all their neighbors, they will have formed a connected
network, where there is at least one multi-hop path between
any two distinct nodes. In SMACS, only partial
information about radio connectivity in the vicinity of a
node is used to assign timeslots to each links. Each node
maintains a TDMA-like frame called super-frame, in which
it schedules different timeslots to communicate with its
known neighbors. In each timeslot, a node only
communicates with one neighbor. Each link operates on a
different frequency, which is chosen randomly from a large
pool of frequencies when the links are established. This
reduces the probability of collision during channel
assignment. After a link is established, a node knows when
to turn on its transceiver to communicate with another node
and will turn off when there is no communication.
Advantages: In SMACS, link assignment is done
without a need for collecting global connectivity
information or even connectivity information that reaches
farther than one hop away. Hence, significant energy
savings can be achieved.
Disadvantages: The drawback of SMACS is its low
bandwidth utilization. For example, if a node only has
packets to be sent to one neighbor, it cannot reuse the
timeslots scheduled for other neighbors.
2) Power Aware Clustered TDMA: Power Aware
Clustered TDMA (PACT) [8] is an energy-efficient
TDMA-based MAC protocol for a large population of
sensors interconnected by a wireless multi-hop network.
The key features of PACT are listed below:
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BMA
MAC [3]
No
Average
Clustered
Dynamic
SOTP [4]
No
Less
Flat
Static
ED-TDMA
[5]
No
Clustered
Dynamic
Mobility
Tolerant
TDMA [6]
SMACS
[7]
No
Clustered
Dynamic
Flat
Static
Clustered
Dynamic
Flat
Dynamic
[1]
Flat
Dynamic
Flat
Dynamic
Flat
Static
Flat
Static
Flat
Static
Flat
Dynamic
Flat
Static
List Of
Protocols
PACT [8]
Distributed
Delay
Topology
Schedule
Less
Yes
Yes
-
REFERENCES
DE-MAC
[9]
Yes
TRAMA
[10]
Yes
BTDOS /
ODS [11]
Yes
L-MAC
[13]
Yes
TDMA-W
[14]
Yes
FlexiMAC [15]
Yes
TDMAASAP [16]
Yes
TDMACA [17]
Yes
Significant
Significant
(depends
on traffic
load)
Guaranteed
Minimum
end-to-end
delay
Significant
(depends
on traffic
load)
V. CONCLUSION
Wireless sensor networks are energy constraint and to
enhance the lifetime of the network an energy efficient
MAC protocol is required. TDMA-based MAC protocols
can be a solution which divides the time span into timeslots and allocate the slots to different nodes in a WSN.
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Protocol Based on conflict-free For Wireless Sensor Networks,
International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Integrated
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NETWORKS: A Networking Perspective, A JOHN WILEY &
SONS, INC., PUBLICATION, ISBN: 978-0-470-16763-2.
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Wireless Sensor Networks, 985.
[20] Ye, W., Heidemann, J. and Estrin, D. 2002. An energy-ecient
MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks, IEEE Infocom 2002,
15671576.
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04: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Mobile
systems, applications, and services, New York, NY, USA, 2004.
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Sciences Institute, 1 8 .
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