Copperbelt University,

School of Engineering,
Mechanical Department

MC 531 : Wireless Sensor Network

Topic : Medium access control protocols (L1)

Welcome !

Presented by
Mr Melele P
Goals of this Unit – MAC Protocol
 Fundamentals of MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor
Networks,
 Low Duty Cycle Protocols And Wakeup Concepts
 Contention –based protocol
 Schedule – based protocol
 SMAC
 B-MAC Protocol,
 TRAMAC
 IEEE 802.15.4

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Lesson outline - Today
 Fundamentals of MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor
Networks,
 MAC Protocols - Overview
 Characteristics of MAC Protocols
 TDMA MAC protocol
 specific requirements and design considerations for MAC
protocols in wireless sensor networks

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MAC Protocols - Overview
 An essential characteristic of wireless communication is
that it provides an inherently shared medium.
 All medium-access control (MAC) protocols for wireless
networks manage the usage of the radio interface to
ensure efficient utilization of the shared bandwidth.
 MAC protocols designed for wireless sensor networks
have an additional goal of managing radio activity to
conserve energy.
 Thus, while traditional MAC protocols must balance
throughput, delay, and fairness concerns, WSN MAC
protocols place an emphasis on energy efficiency as well.

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MAC Protocols - Overview
 In most networks, multiple nodes share a communication
medium for transmitting their data packets.

 MAC protocol (often referred to as a sub layer of the data

link layer of the OSI reference model) is primarily
responsible for regulating access to the common medium.

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MAC Protocols - Overview

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MAC Protocols - Overview
 Most sensor networks and sensing applications rely on
radio transmissions in the unlicensed ISM (Industrial,
Scientific, and Medical) band, which may result in
communications significantly affected by noise and
interferences.
 Choice of MAC protocol has a direct bearing on the
reliability and efficiency of network transmissions due to
these errors and interferences in wireless communications
and to other challenges such as:
o the hidden-terminal and
o exposed-terminal problems

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MAC Protocols - Overview
 Since energy efficiency is a primary concern in a wireless
sensor network, it also affects the design of the MAC
protocol.
 Energy is not only consumed for transmitting and receiving
data, but also for sensing the medium for activity (idle
listening).
 Other reasons for energy consumption include data
retransmissions (e.g., due to collisions), packet overheads,
control packet transmissions, and transmit power levels
that are higher than necessary to reach a receiver.
 It is common for a MAC protocol in WSNs to trade energy
efficiency for increased latency or a reduction in throughput
or fairness

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Characteristics of MAC Protocols
 Basic parameters or Characteristics which determine the
performance of a MAC protocol, the most common ones
can be summarized below
 Transmission delay(Latency): -- the amount of time that
a single message spends in the MAC protocol
 Throughput:-- the rate at which messages are served.
Throughput can be measured in messages or symbols per
second but most commonly is measured in bits per second.
The goal is to maximize it!
 Fairness: A MAC protocol is considered fair if it allocates
a channel among the competing nodes according to some
fairness criteria

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Characteristics of MAC Protocols
 Scalability: Scalability describes the ability of the
communication system to meet performance
characteristics despite of the size of the network and
number of competing nodes.

 Robustness: Robustness is referred to as a composition

of reliability, availability, and dependability

 Stability: Stability describes how good the protocol

handles fluctuation of traffic load over a sustainable period
of time

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Characteristics of MAC Protocols
Goals of MAC protocols
 Minimize Energy Consumption
o Overhearing: unnecessarily receive a packet destined to
another node
o Idle listening: staying active to receive even if there is no
sender

 Minimize the active time

 Eliminate packet collisions

 Minimize control packet overhead

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Characteristics of MAC Protocols
Categories and examples of medium access protocols

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Characteristics of MAC Protocols
 Fixed assignment protocols
 In this class of protocols, the available resources are
divided between the nodes such that the resource
assignment is long term and each node can use its
resources exclusively without the risk of collisions.
 Long term means that the assignment is for durations of
minutes, hours, or even longer, as opposed to the short-
term case where assignments have a scope of a data
burst, corresponding to a time horizon of perhaps (tens of)
milliseconds.
 Typical protocols of this class are TDMA, FDMA, CDMA,
and SDMA

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Fundamentals/Characteristics of MAC Protocols
 Fixed assignment protocols
 FDMA
 In Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA), the
available frequency band is subdivided into a number of
sub channels and these are assigned to nodes, which can
transmit exclusively on their channel.
 This scheme requires frequency synchronization, relatively
narrowband filters, and the ability of a receiver to tune to
the channel used by a transmitter.
 Accordingly, an FDMA transceiver tends to be more
complex than a TDMA transceiver.

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Characteristics of MAC Protocols
 Fixed assignment protocols
 CDMA
 In Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) schemes , the
nodes spread their signals over a much larger bandwidth
than needed, using different codes to separate their
transmissions.
 The receiver has to know the code used by the transmitter;
all parallel transmissions using other codes appear as
noise.
 Crucial to CDMA is the code management.

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Characteristics of MAC Protocols
 Fixed assignment protocols
 SDMA
 Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA), the spatial
separation of nodes is used to separate their
transmissions.
 SDMA requires arrays of antennas and sophisticated
signal processing techniques and cannot be considered a
candidate technology for WSNs.

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TDMA MAC protocol
 In TDMA, a node access a medium for a particular amount
of time, when this is over, then they have to reframe from
communicating

 Divides the channel into N time slots ; in each slot, only

one node is allowed to transmit
 The N slot comprises a frame, which repeats cyclically
 Advantages
 Time is shared fairly, fairness is achieved
 Straight forward
 No collision—no known nodes can transmit outside its slot
 Directly supports low duty cycle operations on nodes
 Energy efficiency – sleep management is easier
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TDMA MAC protocol

 All nodes from 1 to N can determine when they can sleep

when node 1 is communicating,
 Or if node 1 finished communicating and its aware of the
size of the frame
 After completing its slot, it can sleep N-1 slot to save
energy and in case its not expecting any packets from its
neighbor

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TDMA MAC protocol
How is TDMA implemented??

 Time is sliced into multiple slots and each slot is given to a particular
node
 Node can listen at any given time
 All the nodes can send data to a node at any given time, but nodes can
not transmit outside of their slot
 For any neighbor, then a new slots – that means, a frame has N slot
 E.g. ., when node 1 is assign slot 1, node 1 can transmit packet during
slot 1, then it has to wait until all other have utilize their slot and then
can resume communication

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 TDMA MAC Protocol - Disadvantages
 Centralized
 Requires a centralized node which allocates slots to the communicating patters
 If nodes communicates directly, then they must listen during
all slots – reduced efficiency
 Limited scalability and considerable latency
 Less adaptive: -- requires redefining of the frame
 When new nodes join or old nodes leaves, the base station must adjust frame
length or slot allocation
 Frequent changes may be expensive or slow to take effect
 Protocols depends on fine-grained time synchronization to
align slot boundaries
 It needs time
 Nodes should agree on time
 Every now and then, there should be agreement on time --- Most MAC protocol
based on CSMA

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MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network
The specific requirements and design considerations for
MAC protocols in wireless sensor networks are
1. Balance of Requirements :
 For the case of WSNs, the balance of requirements is
different from traditional (wireless) networks.
 The importance of energy efficiency for the design of MAC
protocols is relatively new and many of the “classical”
protocols like ALOHA and CSMA contain no provisions
toward this goal.
 Other requirements like fairness, throughput, transmission
delay, scalability and robustness play a minor role in
sensor networks

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MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network
2. Energy problems on the MAC layer
 A transceiver consumes a significant share of energy. A
transceiver can be in one of the four main states
 Transmitting: In the transmit state, the transmit part of the
transceiver is active and the antenna radiates energy
 Receiving: In the receive state the receive part is active
 Idling: A transceiver that is ready to receive but is not
currently receiving anything is said to be in an idle state. In
this idle state, many parts of the receive circuitry are active,
and others can be switched off
 Sleeping: In the sleep state, significant parts of the
transceiver are switched off

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MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network
3. Energy problems and Design Goals
 Collision: A collision is a wasted effort when two frames
collide with each other and are discarded because the
receiver has to drop the overlapped information.
 collision usually results in retransmission and drains more
energy in transmitting and receiving extra packets.
 The half-duplex nature of the wireless medium precludes
collision detection, thereby increasing the responsibilities of
the MAC protocol.
 Hence, collisions should be avoided, either by design or by
appropriate collision avoidance/hidden-terminal procedures
in CSMA protocols

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MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network
3. Energy problems and Design Goals
 Overhearing:
o An overhearing occurs on the wireless broadcast medium when the
node receives and processes a uncalled packet that is not addressed
to it.
o In the dense network and under heavy traffic situations, this could lead
to a serious problem
 Control packet overhead:
o An increase in the number and size of control packets results in
overhead and unnecessary energy waste for WSNs, especially when
only a few bytes of real data are transmitted in each message.
o Such control signals also decrease the channel capacity.
o A balanced approach is required so that the required number of control
packets can be kept at minimal

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MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network
3. Energy problems and Design Goals
 Idle listening:
o Since a node in a WSN usually does not know when it will
be the receiver of a message, it keeps its radio in ready-to-
receive mode, which consumes almost as much energy as
in receive mode.
o In low traffic applications, this is considered one of the
major sources of energy waste.
o The idle listening consumes significant energy. Hence,
need Periodic listen and sleep.
 Turn off radio when sleeping
 Reduce duty cycle

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MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network
3. Energy problems and Design Goals
 Complexity:
o Computationally expensive algorithms might decrease the
time the node spends in the sleep mode

 Over-emitting:
o An over-emitting or a deafness occurs due to the
transmission of the message when the destination node is
not ready to receive it

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Medium Access layer
 When two or more communicating devices share a
wireless medium, there should be a mechanism that they
can freely communicate without causing interference on
each other
 In Cellar communication, the following are used,
CDMA,FDMA, etc.
 For WSN, these are not used because
 Energy consumption is significantly high or
 Requires complex Transmitters and receiver devices
 Therefore design of transceivers is quite complex, .. Cost is
not affordable
 Therefore, most used MAC protocols are TDMA and CSMA
( examples of contention-based protocol)
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Summary
 Fundamentals of MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor
Networks,
 MAC Protocols - Overview
 Characteristics of MAC Protocols
 TDMA MAC protocol
 specific requirements and design considerations for MAC
protocols in wireless sensor networks

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End of Lesson

To be continued…

Thanks for your attention!

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