S-MAC Sensor Medium Access Control Protocol

An Energy Efficient MAC protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Outline
Introduction Design Considerations Main sources of energy inefficiency Current MAC design S-MAC Protocol implementation in a test-bed Discussion Conclusion and future work

Wireless Sensor Networks

Application specific wireless networks for monitoring, smart spaces, medical systems and robotic exploration

Battery operated and power limited sensor devices Large number of distributed nodes deployed in an ad-hoc fashion

Design Considerations
Primary attributes: Energy Efficiency
often difficult to recharge or replace batteries prolonging the network lifetime is important

Scalability
Some nodes may die or new nodes may join

Secondary attributes: Fairness, latency, throughput and bandwidth

Sources of Energy Inefficiency

Collision Overhearing Control packet overhead Idle listening

Existing MAC Design

Contention-based protocols IEEE 802.11 Idle listening PAMAS heavy duty cycle of the radio, avoids overhearing, idle listening TDMA based protocols Advantages - Reduced energy consumption Problems requires real clusters, and does not support scalability

Design goal of S-MAC

Reduce energy consumption Support good scalability Self-configurable

S-MAC
Tries to reduce wastage of energy from all four sources of energy inefficiency Collision by using RTS and CTS Overhearing by switching the radio off when transmission is not meant for that node Control Overhead by message passing Idle listening by periodic listen and sleep

Is the improvement free of cost?

No In exchange there is some reduction in per-hop fairness and latency But does not reduce end-to-end fairness and latency Is it important for sensor networks?

Network Assumptions
Composed of many small nodes deployed in ad hoc fashion Most communication will be between nodes as peers, rather than a single base station Nodes must self-configure

Application Assumptions
Dedicated to a single application or a few collaborative application Involves in-network processing to reduce traffic and increase life time

Applications will have long idle periods and can tolerate some latency

Components of S-MAC
Periodic listen and sleep Collision and Overhearing avoidance Message passing

Periodic Listen and Sleep

Each node goes into periodic sleep mode during which it switches the radio off and sets a timer to awake later When the timer expires, it wakes up Selection of sleep and listen duration is based on the application scenarios Neighboring nodes are synchronized together

Contd.
Nodes exchange schedules by broadcast Multiple neighbors contend for the medium Once transmission starts, it does not stop until completed
A B C D

Choosing and Maintaining Schedules

Each node maintains a schedule table Initial schedule is established Synchronizer Follower Rules for joining a new node

Maintaining Synchronization
Needed to prevent clock drift Periodic updating using a SYNC packet
Sender Node ID Next-Sleep Time

SYNC Packet

Receivers adjust their timer counters Listen interval divided into two parts Each part further divided into time slots

Timing Relationship

Collision Avoidance
Similar to IEEE 802.11 using RTS/CTS mechanism Perform virtual and physical carrier sense before transmission RTS/CTS addresses the hidden terminal problem NAV indicates how long the remaining transmission will be.

Overhearing Avoidance
Interfering nodes go to sleep after they hear the RTS or CTS packet The medium is busy when the NAV value is not zero All immediate neighbors of sender and receiver should go to sleep

Message Passing
What is a message? Transmitting a message as a long packet High retransmission cost Fragmentation into small packets High control overhead Solution Disadvantage

Protocol Implementation
Test bed Rene motes developed at UCB They run TinyOS, an eventdriven operating system Two types of packets Fixed size data packets with header(6B), payload(30B) and CRC(2B) Control packets (RTS and CTS), header(6B) (2B) CRC

MAC modules implemented

Simplified IEEE 802.11 DCF physical and virtual carrier sense, backoff and retry, RTS/CTS/DATA/ACK packet exchange and fragmentation support Message passing with overhearing avoidance The complete S-MAC all the features are implemented

Conclusions and Future work

S-MAC has good energy conserving properties comparing to IEEE 802.11 Future work Analytical study on the energy consumption and latency Analyze the effect of topology changes

Our Project
Implementing S-MAC on TinyOS 1.0 Incorporating multicasting with S-MAC

Directed Diffusion and S-MAC

S-MAC can be incorporated into the directed diffusion paradigm