MEDIUM ACCESS CONTROL

PROTOCOLS FOR WIRELESS

SENSOR NETWORKS
Communication among wireless sensor nodes is
usually achieved by means of a unique channel
a single node can transmit a message at any given
time
The objective of the MAC protocol is to regulate
access to the shared wireless medium
lower sublayer of the data link layer (DLL) is MAC
sublayer
The higher sublayer of the DLL is referred as the
logical link control (LLC) layer
The MAC sublayer resides directly above the
physical layer
It supports the following basic functions:
 The assembly of data into a frame for transmission
 appending a header field containing addressing information
and
 a trailer field for error detection
 The disassembly of a received frame to extract addressing
and error control information
 to perform address recognition and
 error detection and recovery
 The regulation of access to the shared transmission
medium
The LLC sublayer of the DDL provides a direct interface
to the upper layer protocols
Main purpose is to shield the upper layer protocols from
the characteristics of the underlying physical network
FUNDAMENTALS OF MAC PROTOCOLS
Issue is MAC protocols for shared access media arises from
the spatial distribution of the communicating nodes
the nodes must exchange some amount of coordinating
information
the multiaccess medium problem increases the complexity
of the access control protocol
the overhead required to regulate access among the
competing nodes
Two main factors, the intelligence of the decision made by
the access protocol and the overhead involved
An attempt to improve the quality of decisions does not
necessarily reduce the overhead incurred
reducing the overhead is likely to lower the quality of the
decision
Distributed multiple-access protocols for WSNs operate
somewhere along a spectrum of information ranging from
a minimum amount of information to perfect information
The information can be
 Predetermined information is known to all communicating
nodes
 Dynamic global information is acquired by different nodes
during protocol operation
 Local information is known to individual nodes
Predetermined and dynamic global information may result
in efficient, potentially perfect coordination among the
nodes
local information has potential
 to reduce the overhead required to coordinate the competing
nodes
 result in poor overall performance of the protocol
Performance metrics for the MAC protocol
Delay
 Delay refers to the amount of time spent by a data packet in the
MAC layer before it is transmitted successfully
 Delay depends on the network traffic load, and the design choices
of the MAC protocol
 For time-critical applications the MAC protocol is required to
support delay-bound guarantees
 Guaranteed delay bounds are provided through careful message
scheduling
 locally within a communicating
 node and globally among all nodes in the network
 Probabilistic delay guarantees are typically characterized by an
expected value, a variance and a confidence interval.
 Deterministic delay guarantees ensure a predictable number of
state transitions between message arrival and message
 Throughput
 Throughput is typically defined as the rate at which messages are
serviced by a communication system.
 It is usually measured either in messages per second or bits per
second.
 In wireless environments it represents the fraction of the channel
capacity used for data transmission.
 Throughput increases as the load on the communication system
increases initially.
 After the load reaches a certain threshold, the throughput ceases to
increase, or it may start to decrease
 Robustness
 Robustness, defined as a combination of reliability, availability, and
dependability requirements, reflects the degree of the protocol
insensitivity to errors and misinformation
 Robustness is a multidimensional activity that must simultaneously
address issues such as error confinement, error detection and
masking, reconfiguration, and restart
Scalability
Scalability refers to the ability of a communications
system to meet its performance characteristics
In WSNs, the number of sensor nodes may be very large,
scalability becomes a critical factor
to achieve scalability is
 to avoid relying on globally consistent network states
 to localize interactions among the communicating nodes,

through the development of hierarchical structures and

information aggregation strategies
Grouping sensor nodes into clusters
aggregating information from different sensors allows
the development of traffic patterns
Stability
Stability refers to the ability of a communications system
to handle fluctuations of the traffic load over sustained
periods of time
A stable MAC protocol must be able to handle
instantaneous loads
A MAC protocol is considered to be stable, with respect
to delay, if the message waiting time is bounded
a MAC protocol is stable if the throughput does not
collapse as the load offered increases
Accommodating load fluctuations while maintaining
system stability is difficult to achieve in time-varying
large-scale WSNs
One way to solve is careful scheduling of bursty traffic
Fairness
 A MAC protocol is considered to be fair if it allocates channel
capacity evenly among the competing communicating nodes
without unduly reducing the network throughput.
 Achieving fairness among competing nodes is desirable to
achieve equitable QoS and avoid situations where some nodes
fare better than other nodes
 To accommodate heterogeneous resource demands,
communicating nodes are assigned different weights to reflect
their relative resource share
 Proportional fairness is then achieved based on the weights
assigned
 Fair resource allocation in wireless networks is difficult to
achieve
 global information may be required to coordinate access to the
communication medium among all contending stations
 Energy Efficiency
 sensor nodes are powered using batteries with small capacity
 wireless sensor nodes deployed in unattended environments, making it
difficult to change their batteries
 One possible approach to reducing energy consumption at a sensor node is
to use low-power
 electronics
 The integration of low-power chips in the design of sensor nodes is a
necessary
 Several sources contribute to energy inefficiency in MAC-layer protocols
 collision, which occurs when two or more sensor nodes attempt to transmit
simultaneously
 idle listening, a sensor node enters this mode when it is listening for a traffic that is
not sent
 overhearing which occurs when a sensor node receives packets that are destined
to other nodes
 control packet overhead, Control packets are required to regulate access to the
transmission channel
 frequent switching between different operation modes may result in significant
energy consumption