iQueue-MAC: A Traffic Adaptive duty-cycled MAC
Protocol With Dynamic Slot Allocation
Shuguo Zhuo
†
, Zhi Wang
†
, Ye-Qiong Song
‡
, Zhibo Wang
†
and Luis Almeida
§
†
State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, CHINA
Email: zhuosgzju@gmail.com, {wangzhi, zbwang}@iipc.zju.edu.cn
‡
LORIA, University of Lorraine, Campus Scientifique, Vandoeuvre, France
Email: song@loria.fr
§
Instituto de Telecomunicacoes, Universidade do Porto, FEUP, Porto, Portugal
Email: lda@fe.up.pt
Abstract—Duty-cycling technique has been widely adopted in
MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks to conserve energy.
However, low duty-cycle also leads to limited throughput in most
of existing solutions. In this paper, we propose iQueue-MAC to
provide immediate yet energy-efficient throughput enhancement
for dealing with burst or heavy traffic. Combined with CSMA/CA,
iQueue-MAC makes use of queue length of each sensor node and
allocates suitable TDMA slots to them for packets transmission.
During light traffic period, no extra slots will be allocated;
iQueue-MAC acts like other low duty-cycle MACs to conserve
power. While in burst or heavy traffic period, iQueue-MAC
senses the build up of packet queues and dynamically schedules
adequate number of slots for packet transmission. We have
implemented iQueue-MAC on STM32W108 chips that offer
IEEE 802.15.4 standard communication. We set up several real-
world experimental scenarios, including a 46 nodes multi-hop
test-bed for simulating a general application, and conducted
numerous experiments to evaluate iQueue-MAC, in comparison
with other traffic adaptive duty-cycle protocols, such as multi-
channel version RI-MAC and CoSenS. Results clearly show that
iQueue-MAC outperforms multi-channel version of RI-MAC and
CoSenS in terms of packet delay and throughput.
I. INTRODUCTION
In wireless sensor networks (WSN), keeping nodes in
low duty-cycle, i.e., interleaving very short active and long
sleeping periods, is the most efficient way to save energy, thus
prolonging network lifetime. However, there is a cost to pay in
both low network throughput and extra packet delay, since the
network nominal data rate is roughly decreased by the duty-
cycle factor and a packet should wait until the next forwarder
wakes up to transmit it. How to provide high throughput and
short delay, while still keeping low power consumption (so
low duty-cycle), is the main challenge of the current WSN
MAC protocol research. In fact, from typical application point
of view, in addition to low rate periodic traffic, burst traffic is
triggered following event detections. So an ideal MAC protocol
should be able to self-adapt its offered bandwidth to cope with
the dynamic traffic load, so that the energy is only used for
carrying the application traffic whenever needed.
Lots of low power traffic adaptive MAC protocols have
been proposed [5]. For instance, in contention-based WSN,
for better dealing with the collisions during burst traffic period,
Strawman MAC protocol [9], upon detection of collisions at
the receiver, uses a kind of black burst mechanism [14] for
better resolving collisions, instead of using random backoff of
CSMA. Although Strawman MAC improves the throughput to
a certain extent (and does better than RI-MAC [15]), it still
introduces overheads and additional delays. So there is space
for improvement. To radically resolve this problem, the most
efficient way is to only keep CSMA in light traffic for its
flexibility, and use TDMA during heavy or burst traffic load
periods for solving the inherent drawback of the contention-
based MAC, achieving thus high throughput. The first tentative
of hybrid CSMA/TDMA for duty-cycled WSN includes IEEE
802.15.4 beacon-enabled mode (CSMA during CAP and GTS
during CFP) and Z-MAC [12]. But the basic design approach
of Z-MAC is essentially TDMA-based. CSMA is only used
when the slot owner has no data to transmit (slot stealing). So
only the slot owners can have their pre-allocated bandwidth
guarantee. Burst traffic of the other nodes still cannot be
efficiently carried. To deal with this problem, adaptive time
slot assignment is the best way. TRAMA [11] and AI-MAC
[3] follow this idea. But TRAMA suffers from time slot spatial
reuse problem and has high overhead for executing the adaptive
election algorithm. AI-MAC only relies on the sink initiated
query in a tree topology.
In this paper, we present iQueue-MAC, which runs in
CSMA in light load. When load increases, the senders’ queue
length will be used to dynamically allocate time slots to the
senders (TDMA). The whole network is composed of two
kinds of nodes: simple nodes (e.g. RFD of IEEE 802.15.4)
and routers (FFD of IEEE 802.15.4, such as coordinators).
Simple nodes only wakeup when they have data to send, so
their energy consumption is minimized. Each simple node is
associated to a router. A router is responsible of collecting
the data packets of the simple nodes that are associated to it.
The design of iQueue-MAC protocol follows five key features:
using queue-length piggybacking as accurate load information
without additional overhead, dynamically allocating TDMA
time slots to simple nodes (data senders) for allowing high
throughput, using LPL (as X-MAC [10]) to ”synchronize”
neighboring routers, sending as a burst the queued packets (as
T-MAC [16]) from router to router for shortening the channel
access delay, and using multi-channels (local channel to a
router, and common channel between routers) for exploiting
both time and spatial reuse. This results in a highly efficient
MAC protocol that we have implemented on STM32W108
chips that offer IEEE 802.15.4 standard communication. For
comparison, we also implemented the often referenced RI-
2013 IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communications and Networking (SECON)
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