John Heidemann / Papers / Medium Access Control with Coordinated, Adaptive Sleeping for Wireless Sensor Networks

Medium Access Control with Coordinated, Adaptive Sleeping for Wireless Sensor Networks
Wei Ye, John Heidemann and Deborah Estrin
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Citation

Wei Ye, John Heidemann and Deborah Estrin. Medium Access Control with Coordinated, Adaptive Sleeping for Wireless Sensor Networks. Technical Report ISI-TR-2003-567. USC/Information Sciences Institute. [PDF] [alt PDF]

Abstract

This paper proposes S-MAC, a medium-access control (MAC) protocol designed for wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices. A network of these devices will collaborate for a common application such as environmental monitoring. We expect sensor networks to be deployed in an ad hoc fashion, with individual nodes remaining largely inactive for long periods of time, but then becoming suddenly active when something is detected. These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC that is different from traditional wireless MACs such as IEEE 802.11 in several ways: energy conservation and self-configuration are primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important. S-MAC uses three novel techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self-configuration. To reduce energy consumption in listening to an idle channel, nodes periodically sleep. Neighboring nodes form virtual clusters to auto-synchronize on sleep schedules. Inspired by PAMAS, S-MAC also sets the radio to sleep during transmissions of other nodes. Unlike PAMAS, it only uses in-channel signaling. Finally, S-MAC applies message passing to reduce contention latency for sensor-network applications that require store-and-forward processing as data move through the network. We evaluate our implementation of S-MAC over a sample sensor node, the UCB Mote. The experimental results show that, on a source node, an 802.11-like MAC consumes 2–6 times more energy than S-MAC for traffic load with messages sent every 1–10s.

Bibtex Citation

@techreport{Ye03a,
  author = {Ye, Wei and Heidemann, John and Estrin, Deborah},
  title = {Medium Access Control with Coordinated, Adaptive Sleeping for Wireless Sensor Networks},
  institution = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  year = {2003},
  sortdate = {2003-01-01},
  project = {ilense, macss, scowr, scadds},
  jsubject = {chronological},
  number = {ISI-TR-2003-567},
  month = jan,
  note = {accepted to appear IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking},
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {s-mac, adaptive sleep},
  otherurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7eweiye/pub/smac_tr567.pdf},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Ye03a.html},
  myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Ye03a.pdf},
  psurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Ye03a.ps.gz}
}
Copyright © by John Heidemann