Altruistic cooperation for energy-efficient multi-channel MAC protocols

ABSTRACT

Recently, a new notion of cooperation was proposed to solve multi-channel coordination problems. When a transmit-receive pair wishes to initiate communication, neighboring nodes share their knowledge of channel usage. This helps to substantially reduce collisions and increases throughput significantly. However, it comes at the cost of increased energy consumption since idle nodes have to stay awake to overhear and acquire channel usage information. In fact this can be as high as 264% of a power-saving protocol without cooperation. In this paper, we propose a strategy called altruistic cooperation for cooperative multi-channel MAC protocols to conserve energy. The core idea is to introduce specialized nodes called altruists in the network whose only role is to acquire and share channel usage information. All other nodes, termed peers, go in to the sleep mode when idle. This strategy seems naive because it needs additional nodes to be deployed. In fact, it is unclear whether a desirable throughput-energy trade-off can be achieved and whether the cost of additional nodes can offset the performance gain. We perform a close study on this strategy in terms of three aspects: network deployment, cost efficiency, and system performance. Our study indicates that only a few additional nodes need to be deployed and cost efficiency is more than doubled in terms of a new metric called bit-price ratio that we propose. By using the strategy, a cooperative protocol is found to save up to 70% energy while not compromising throughput.

REFERENCES

• 1: Paramvir Bahl , Ranveer Chandra , John Dunagan, SSCH: slotted seeded channel hopping for capacity improvement in IEEE 802.11 ad-hoc wireless networks, Proceedings of the 10th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 26-October 01, 2004, Philadelphia, PA, USA [doi>10.1145/1023720.1023742]
• 2: Cisco Systems Inc. Cisco aironet 350 series client adapters. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/wireless/ps4555.
• 3: L. M. Feeney and M. Nilsson. Investigating the energy consumption of a wireless network interface in an ad hoc networking environment. In IEEE Infocom, 2001.
• 4: T. Luo, M. Motani, and V. Srinivasan. CAM-MAC: A cooperative asynchronous multi-channel MAC protocol for ad hoc networks. In IEEE BroadNets, San Jose, CA, USA, October 2006.
• 5: T. Luo, V. Srinivasan, and M. Motani. CAM-MAC: A cooperative asynchronous multi-channel MAC protocol for ad hoc networks. Technical report, Dept. ECE, National University of Singapore, 2007. Available online at http://cnds.ece.nus.edu.sg/tie/cammac-tech.pdf.
• 6: Jingpu Shi , Theodoros Salonidis , Edward W. Knightly, Starvation mitigation through multi-channel coordination in CSMA multi-hop wireless networks, Proceedings of the 7th ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing, May 22-25, 2006, Florence, Italy [doi>10.1145/1132905.1132929]
• 7: Hoi-Sheung Wilson So , Giang Nguyen , Jean Walrand, Practical synchronization techniques for multi-channel MAC, Proceedings of the 12th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 23-29, 2006, Los Angeles, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/1161089.1161105]
• 8: Jungmin So , Nitin H. Vaidya, Multi-channel mac for ad hoc networks: handling multi-channel hidden terminals using a single transceiver, Proceedings of the 5th ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing, May 24-26, 2004, Roppongi Hills, Tokyo, Japan [doi>10.1145/989459.989487]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Wireless communication

General Terms:
Design, Performance

Keywords:
MAC protocol, cooperation, energy efficiency, multi-channel