Sinem Coleri Ergen

Performance Analysis of Slotted Carrier Sense IEEE 802.15.4 Medium Access Layer

Advances in low-power and low-cost sensor networks have led to solutions mature enough for use in a broad range of applications varying from health monitoring to building surveillance. The development of those applications has been stimulated by the finalization of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which defines the medium access control (MAC) and physical layer for sensor networks. One of the MAC schemes proposed is slotted carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), and this paper analyzes whether this scheme meets the design constraints of those low-power and low-cost sensor networks. The paper provides a detailed analytical evaluation of its performance in a star topology network, for uplink and acknowledged uplink traffic. Both saturated and unsaturated periodic traffic scenarios are considered. The form of the analysis is similar to that of Bianchi for IEEE 802.11 DCF only in the use of a per user Markov model to capture the state of each user at each moment in time. The key assumptions to enable this important simplification and the coupling of the per user Markov models are however different, as a result of the very different designs of the 802.15.4 and 802.11 carrier sensing mechanisms. The performance predicted by the analytical model is very close to that obtained by simulation. Throughput and energy consumption analysis is then performed by using the model for a range of scenarios. Some design guidelines are derived to set the 802.15.4 parameters as function of the network requirements.

PEDAMACS: power efficient and delay aware medium access protocol for sensor networks

PEDAMACS is a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) scheme that extends the common single hop TDMA to a multihop sensor network, using a high-powered access point to synchronize the nodes and to schedule their transmissions and receptions. The protocol first enables the access point to gather topology (connectivity) information. A scheduling algorithm then determines when each node should transmit and receive data, and the access point announces the transmission schedule to the other nodes. The performance of PEDAMACS is compared to existing protocols based on simulations in TOSSIM, a simulation environment for TinyOS, the operating system for the Berkeley sensor nodes. For the traffic application we consider, the PEDAMACS network provides a lifetime of several years compared to several months and days based on random access schemes with and without sleep cycles, respectively, making sensor network technology economically viable.

TDMA scheduling algorithms for wireless sensor networks

Algorithms for scheduling TDMA transmissions in multi-hop networks usually determine the smallest length conflict-free assignment of slots in which each link or node is activated at least once. This is based on the assumption that there are many independent point-to-point flows in the network. In sensor networks however often data are transferred from the sensor nodes to a few central data collectors. The scheduling problem is therefore to determine the smallest length conflict-free assignment of slots during which the packets generated at each node reach their destination. The conflicting node transmissions are determined based on an interference graph, which may be different from connectivity graph due to the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions. We show that this problem is NP-complete. We first propose two centralized heuristic algorithms: one based on direct scheduling of the nodes or node-based scheduling, which is adapted from classical multi-hop scheduling algorithms for general ad hoc networks, and the other based on scheduling the levels in the routing tree before scheduling the nodes or level-based scheduling, which is a novel scheduling algorithm for many-to-one communication in sensor networks. The performance of these algorithms depends on the distribution of the nodes across the levels. We then propose a distributed algorithm based on the distributed coloring of the nodes, that increases the delay by a factor of 10–70 over centralized algorithms for 1000 nodes. We also obtain upper bound for these schedules as a function of the total number of packets generated in the network.

WLC10-5: Performance Analysis of Slotted Carrier Sense IEEE 802.15.4 Medium Access Layer

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard defines the medium access control (MAC) and physical layer for sensor networks. One of the MAC schemes proposed is slotted carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), and this paper analyzes whether this scheme meets the design constraints of low-power and low-cost sensor networks. The paper provides a detailed analytical evaluation of its performance in a star topology network for both saturated and unsaturated periodic traffic.The form of the analysis is similar to that of Bianchi for IEEE 802.11 DCF only in the use of a per user Markov model to capture the state of each user at each moment in time. The key assumptions to enable this important simplification and the coupling of the per user Markov models are however different, as a result of the very different designs of the 802.15.4 and 802.11 carrier sensing mechanisms. The performance predicted by the analytical model is very close to that obtained by simulation. Throughput and energy consumption analysis is then performed and design guidelines are derived.

Energy efficient routing with delay guarantee for sensor networks

The paper presents a routing algorithm that maximizes the lifetime of a sensor network in which all data packets are destined for a single collection node. Lifetime is maximized by adjusting the number of packets traversing each node. The adjustment is carried out by transmitting over alternative routes. The first part of the paper assumes that the worst case delay resulting from energy efficient routing is less than the maximum tolerable value. Ignoring the delay constraint of the network, the routes are selected as the solution to a linear programming (LP) problem in which the objective is to maximize the minimum lifetime of each node. The solution is implemented in a centralized algorithm, and then approximated by an iterative algorithm based on least cost path routing, in which each step is implemented efficiently in a distributed manner. The second part of the paper incorporates delay guarantee into energy efficient routing by constraining the length of the routing paths from each sensor node to the collection node. Simulations reveal that the lifetime of the network increases significantly by optimal routing, and including delay constraint in energy efficient routing improves the network performance since the delay of the network keeps increasing as the delay constraint is relaxed beyond the value at which the optimal lifetime is achieved.

Multihop-Cluster-Based IEEE 802.11p and LTE Hybrid Architecture for VANET Safety Message Dissemination

Several vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) studies have focused on communication methods based on IEEE 802.11p, which forms the standard for wireless access for vehicular environments. In networks employing IEEE 802.11p only, the broadcast storm and disconnected network problems at high and low vehicle densities, respectively, degrade the delay and delivery ratio of safety message dissemination. Recently, as an alternative to the IEEE 802.11p-based VANET, the usage of cellular technologies has been investigated due to their low latency and wide-range communication. However, a pure cellular-based VANET communication is not feasible due to the high cost of communication between the vehicles and the base stations and the high number of handoff occurrences at the base station, considering the high mobility of the vehicles. This paper proposes a hybrid architecture, namely, VMaSC-LTE, combining IEEE 802.11p-based multihop clustering and the fourth-generation (4G) cellular system, i.e., Long-Term Evolution (LTE), with the goal of achieving a high data packet delivery ratio (DPDR) and low delay while keeping the usage of the cellular architecture at a minimum level. In VMaSC-LTE, vehicles are clustered based on a novel approach named Vehicular Multihop algorithm for Stable Clustering (VMaSC). The features of VMaSC are cluster head (CH) selection using the relative mobility metric calculated as the average relative speed with respect to the neighboring vehicles, cluster connection with minimum overhead by introducing a direct connection to the neighbor that is already a head or a member of a cluster instead of connecting to the CH in multiple hops, disseminating cluster member information within periodic hello packets, reactive clustering to maintain the cluster structure without excessive consumption of network resources, and efficient size- and hop-limited cluster merging mechanism based on the exchange of cluster information among CHs. These features decrease the number of CHs while increasing their stability, therefore minimizing the usage of the cellular architecture. From the clustered topology, elected CHs operate as dual-interface nodes with the functionality of the IEEE 802.11p and LTE interface to link the VANET to the LTE network. Using various key metrics of interest, including DPDR, delay, control overhead, and clustering stability, we demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed architecture compared with both previously proposed hybrid architectures and alternative routing mechanisms, including flooding and cluster-based routing via extensive simulations in ns-3 with the vehicle mobility input from the Simulation of Urban Mobility. The proposed architecture also allows achieving higher required reliability of the application quantified by the DPDR at the cost of higher LTE usage measured by the number of CHs in the network.

The Tire as an Intelligent Sensor

Active safety systems are based upon the accurate and fast estimation of the value of important dynamical variables such as forces, load transfer, actual tire-road friction (kinetic friction) muk, and maximum tire-road friction available (potential friction) mup. Measuring these parameters directly from tires offers the potential for improving significantly the performance of active safety systems. We present a distributed architecture for a data-acquisition system that is based on a number of complex intelligent sensors inside the tire that form a wireless sensor network with coordination nodes placed on the body of the car. The design of this system has been extremely challenging due to the very limited available energy combined with strict application requirements for data rate, delay, size, weight, and reliability in a highly dynamical environment. Moreover, it required expertise in multiple engineering disciplines, including control-system design, signal processing, integrated-circuit design, communications, real-time software design, antenna design, energy scavenging, and system assembly.

Optimal Placement of Relay Nodes for Energy Efficiency in Sensor Networks

Energy efficient system design in wireless sensor networks has been previously discussed at different levels of the network protocol stack so as to provide the maximum possible lifetime of a given network. This paper proposes a novel idea to save energy through extra re lay nodes by eliminating geometric deficiencies of the given topology. Given the sensing locations, the problem is to determine the optimal locations of relay nodes together with the optimal energy provided to them so that the network is alive during the desired lifetime with minimum total energy. We first formulate the problem as a nonlinear programming problem. We then propose an approximation algorithm based on restricting the locations where the relay nodes are allowed to a square lattice. This algorithm approximates the original problem with performance ratio of as low as 2 by trading complexity. For the parking lot application we consider, the relay nodes provide a significant decrease in the total energy required to achieve a specific lifetime.

On multi-hop routing for energy efficiency

We compare two multi-hop routing schemes: the first maximizes the minimum lifetime of the nodes; the second minimizes total energy consumption. We consider both the transmission energy and circuit energy spent in transmission, as well as the receiver energy. The comparison reveals that multihop routing is preferred by the first scheme when the ratio of transmission energy to circuit energy is low and by the second scheme when this ratio is high. In order to balance the load, the first scheme limits the range of multi-hop routing.

Vehicle Mobility and Communication Channel Models for Realistic and Efficient Highway VANET Simulation

Developing real-time safety and nonsafety applications for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) requires understanding of the dynamics of the network topology characteristics since these dynamics determine both the performance of routing protocols and the feasibility of an application over VANETs. Using various key metrics of interest, including node degree, neighbor distribution, number of clusters, and link duration, we provide a realistic analysis of the VANET topology characteristics over time and space for a highway scenario. In this analysis, we integrate real-world road topology and real-time data extracted from the freeway Performance Measurement System (PeMS) database into a microscopic mobility model to generate realistic traffic flows along the highway. Moreover, we use a more realistic, recently proposed, obstacle-based channel model and compare the performance of this sophisticated model to the most commonly used and more simplistic channel models, including unit disk and lognormal shadowing models. Our investigation on the key metrics reveals that both lognormal and unit disk models fail to provide realistic VANET topology characteristics. We therefore propose a matching mechanism to tune the parameters of the lognormal model according to the vehicle density and a correlation model to take into account the evolution of the link characteristics over time. The proposed method has been demonstrated to provide a good match with the computationally expensive and difficult-to-implement obstacle-based model. The parameters of the proposed model have been validated to depend only on the vehicle traffic density based on the real data of four different highways in California.