RI-MAC: a receiver-initiated asynchronous duty cycle MAC protocol for dynamic traffic loads in wireless sensor networks

ABSTRACT

The problem of idle listening is one of the most significant sources of energy consumption in wireless sensor nodes, and many techniques have been proposed based on duty cycling to reduce this cost. In this paper, we present a new asynchronous duty cycle MAC protocol, called Receiver-Initiated MAC (RI-MAC), that uses receiver-initiated data transmission in order to efficiently and effectively operate over a wide range of traffic loads. RI-MAC attempts to minimize the time a sender and its intended receiver occupy the wireless medium to find a rendezvous time for exchanging data, while still decoupling the sender and receiver's duty cycle schedules. We show the performance of RI-MAC through detailed ns-2 simulation and through measurements of an implementation in TinyOS in a testbed of MICAz motes. Compared to the prior asynchronous duty cycling approach of X-MAC, RI-MAC achieves higher throughput, packet delivery ratio, and power efficiency under a wide range of traffic loads. Especially when there are contending flows, such as bursty traffic or transmissions from hidden nodes, RI-MAC significantly improves throughput and packet delivery ratio. Even under light traffic load for which X-MAC is optimized, RI-MAC achieves the same high performance in terms of packet delivery ratio and latency while maintaining comparable power efficiency.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.2 Network Protocols

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.5 Local and Wide-Area Networks
          Subjects: Access schemes

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Performance

Keywords:
asynchronous duty cycling, energy, medium access control, ns-2, sensor networks, tinyos