Chapter #9

ENERGY EFFICIENT MAC PROTOCOLS FOR

WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Mohamed Younis* and Tamer Nadeem**

*
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of
Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21205
**
Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland College Park, College
Park, MD 20742

Abstract: Wide range of applications such as disaster management, military and security
have fueled the interest in sensor networks during the past few years. Sensors
are typically capable of wireless communication and are significantly
constrained in the amount of available resources such as energy, storage and
computation. Such constraints make the design and operation of sensor
networks considerably different from contemporary wireless networks, and
necessitate the development of resource conscious protocols and management
techniques. In this chapter we highlight the medium arbitration issues and the
general requirements of link-layer protocols. We analyze the energy
consumption model of widely used approaches and characterize the efficiency
features. We further report on the current state of the research and highlight
open issues.

Key words: Wireless sensor networks, Energy efficient design, Link-layer protocols,
Energy-aware communication, Medium access arbitration.

1. INTRODUCTION

In recent years there have been major advances in the development of

low power micro sensors. The emergence of such sensors has led
practitioners to envision networking of a large set of sensors scattered over a
wide area of interest1-5. A typical architecture of a sensor network consists of
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many sensing devices that are capable of probing the environment and
reporting the collected data, using a radio, to a command center (sink)6,7.
Sensor networks can serve many civil and military applications such as
disaster management, combat field surveillance and security. In such
applications, the sensors are usually powered using small batteries and
deployed in unattended setup. Therefore, replacing sensor’s battery is not
possible or not practical. Such energy constraints limit sensors’ lifetime and
thus make efficient design and management of sensor networks a real
challenge.
The limitation of energy supply on-board the sensor nodes, has motivated
a lot of the research on sensor networks. Such a research can be classified
into two general categories addressing the main causes of energy
consumption; signal processing and radio communication. The first category
of work is dedicated to extending the life of the network through the
selective engagement of a subset of the sensors in monitoring the
environment8,9. Unselected sensor can switch to a low-power sleep mode.
The goal of this work, which often is referred to as network organization, is
to maintain enough live sensors to cover the area of interest for the longest
possible duration. Sensor organization often involves signal processing
techniques and geographical mapping in order to ensure a sufficient
coverage using the least possible number of deployed sensors.
The second category includes research on energy efficient radio
communication. The network and link layers have received the most notable
attention with the bulk of the work focusing on energy-awareness and
minimization through clever route setup10-14. The main idea of energy-aware
routing is to minimize the transmission power, which is proportional to
distance squared, through the pursuance of multi-hop data forwarding so that
the cumulative transmission energy is reduced compared to direct sensor-
sink communication. Energy-efficient link layer protocols tackle the energy
wastage due to collisions among the radio transmission of nodes, keeping the
receiver unnecessarily active and the excessive state changes of the radio
circuit15-17. In this chapter we concentrate on the minimization of energy
consumption at the link layer.
The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. In section 2, we discuss
the energy consumption models for radio circuitries identifying the major
affecting parameters. Section 2 also includes a detailed analysis of the
energy implications of widely-used MAC protocols for contemporary
wireless networks. We investigate link-layer issues for wireless sensor
networks in section 3 and enumerate the characteristics of ideal MAC
protocols. Section 4 reports on the state of the research on energy efficient
MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks. Finally, we conclude the
#9. Energy efficient MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks 3

chapter in section 5 with a summary and a discussion of possible future

research directions.

2. ANALYSIS OF ENERGY CONSUMPTION AT

THE LINK LAYER

Recent technological breakthroughs in ultra-high integration and low-

power electronics have enabled the development of tiny battery-operated
(0.5~1.5 Ah, 1.2~3.6 V)1,18-20 sensors. Given the interest in using such
sensors in unattended deployment in usually harsh environments, the
replenishment of sensor batteries might be impossible and thus, sensors are energy
constrained and their lifetime strongly depends on how long their batteries last.
In addition to the sensing ability which is the main task, a sensor typically
performs signal processing and data transmission.
Measurements have shown that out of these three major sensor activities,
a sensor expends maximum energy in data communication. This involves
transmission, reception, and being idle. For example, Stemm and Katz’s
measurements have concluded that the ratio of the power consumption of the
CPU, memory and display systems on a PDA device to its wireless network
interface is varied from 1:0.97 to 1:1.88 for different devices and network
interfaces8,21. In addition, Dam and Langendoen have shown that the ratios
of the processor and the radio power for their EYES sensor nodes varies
from 1:12.5 when both in sleep mode to 1:4.76 when both in active mode20.
Therefore, the sensor’s MAC protocol should manage the radio in optimal
way to maintain sufficient sensor energy for the required mission.
In this section we analyze the energy models of the radio circuitry and
the different factors that affect the level of energy consumption in wireless
communication. In addition, we study and compare the energy required by
contemporary link layer protocols that are widely used in wireless data
networks and voice communication infrastructure.

2.1 Radio Energy Consumption Models

Typically, a radio can operate in four distinct modes of operation: Idle,

Receive, Transmit, and Sleep. While it is expected that the radio consumes
the most energy in the “Transmit” and “Receive” modes, running in the
“Idle” mode is also costly. In most cases, operating in “Idle” mode results in
significantly high energy consumption, because the radio electronics have be
turned on and continually decode radio signals, even noise, to detect the
presence of an incoming packets. Different measurements have shown that
the energy consumption ratio of these three modes could be as 1:1.05:1.421,
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1:1:2.722, and 1:2:2.523, respectively. It is thus desirable to completely shut

down the radio rather than transiting into the “Idle” mode. However,
switching a radio on and off very frequently can sometimes result in even
more energy consumption than leaving the transceiver unit in “Idle” mode
because of the start-up power. Moreover, as the transmission packet size gets
smaller, the transition energy becomes dominant to the energy consumed
during receiving and transmitting of packets18,19. Therefore, it is important to
take this issue into account when designing energy-efficient MAC protocols.
Radio energy consumption, Eradio, could be formulated as simple as19:
Eradio = [(c Ptx) + b] T,
where c is the transmission power coefficient, b is the constant power offset,
Ptx is the power used in transmitting the signal, and T is the transmission
time. A more complex model of Eradio that extends the formulation of Shih,
et al., 18 can be expressed as:
Eradio = [Ptx (Ttx + Ntx Tst) + Pout Ttx] + [Prx (Trx + Nrx Tst)] + Pidle Tidle,
where Ptx/rx is the power consumed by the transmitter/receiver; Pout is the
transmitter output power; Pidle is the power that the radio uses in the idle
mode, Ttx/rx is the average time a transmitter/receiver is used each second
(actual data transmission/reception time); Tidle is the average time per second
a node is on and idle, Tst is the start-up time of the transceiver and Ntx/rx
denotes the average number of times per second the transmitter/receiver is
turned on. Ntx/rx mainly depends on the application’s traffic model and
medium access arbitration scheme. Ttx/rx depends on the packet size, the
channel data rate and the average number of packets sent/received per
second. Pout depends on the distance that the signal travels to destination and
the surrounding terrain. Pidle is typically very close to Prx. The power
consumption when the radio is in the sleep mode is usually 1 to 4 orders of
magnitude less than Pidle22,24,25. A detailed analysis of the power consumption
of the radio circuit at the level of the individual function is provided by
Wang, et al.19.
Considering the above discussion and the energy consumption model, the
major sources of energy wastage at the link layer could be enumerated as
follows26-29. The first source is overhearing, meaning the node receive
packets that is destined to other nodes. Second, the overhead of sending and
receiving medium access control packets. The third source is collisions in
which multiple packets get transmitted simultaneously magnifying the signal
interference and thus mandating retransmissions. The fourth is the wireless
noise in which packets get corrupted and need to be retransmitted or to
increase the transmission power to overcome the noise level. The fifth cause
of energy wastage is the excessive periods of being in an idle state. Finally,
frequent switching between modes especially switching from sleep mode to
an active mode leads to significant energy consumption.
#9. Energy efficient MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks 5

2.2 Contemporary MAC Schemes for Wireless Networks

Medium access control covers two main issues: resource sharing method
and multiple access arbitration. A number of MAC schemes are very popular
in wireless networks. Most notable MAC schemes are, time division multiple
access (TDMA), frequency division multiple access (FDMA), and code
division multiple access (CDMA). In this subsection, we analyze the trade-
off between the performance and energy consumption of these schemes,
setting the stage for further analysis in section 3 in the context of sensor
networks.
TDMA: In the TDMA scheme, time is divided into slots and each node is
scheduled, typically through a central controller or a base-station, to transmit
or receive during specific slot(s). In a node’s time slot, the full bandwidth of
the channel is dedicated for data communication. As the transmission time is
inversely proportional to the signal bandwidth, the transmission time (Ttx) in
the radio energy consumption model will be minimized. Moreover, the
node’s knowledge of its allocated communication time slots allows the node
to transition to sleep mode during inactive slots. Therefore, the energy
wastage due to overhearing and idle mode can be avoided.
However, the TDMA scheme requires maintaining synchronized clocks
throughout the network. Due to drifts, finite error can be introduced among
nodes’ reference clocks causing collisions among transmitted data packets.
Therefore, the base-station usually broadcasts periodic synchronization
packets. Each node should not miss these synchronization packets and thus
be activated prior to their transmission. Assuming that Tguard is the smallest
time gap between two consecutive slots and δ is the highest possible clock
drift between the clocks of two sensor, nodes must resynchronized at least
once each Tguard/δ to avoid packet collisions. In other words, the nodes must
be active at least δ/Tguard number of times every second to get
resynchronized. Based on the radio energy consumption model, the number
of times a node is reactivated to receive a packet should be reduces in order
to keep energy consumption at minimum and thus Tguard must be maximized.
However, increasing Tguard will decrease the effective bandwidth and
increase communication latency.
FDMA: The FDMA scheme eliminates the latency concern of time-based
medium arbitration by allowing multiple nodes to communicate
simultaneously. The total available bandwidth is divided into multiple
channels that nodes are assigned to use. Collisions are minimized since
nodes do not have to contend for the same channel. However, in a FDMA-
based medium access control a lower bandwidth is available for each node
and thus the transmission time Ttx gets extended, which is translated to an
increase in the power consumption. On the other hand, since no
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synchronization mechanism is required in this scheme, Nrx becomes minimal

leading to considerable energy savings. A hybrid TDMA/FDMA mechanism
could be used to combine the advantages of both schemes and to overcome
some of their shortcomings18.
CDMA: The CDMA scheme enables simultaneous transmissions with
minimal interference and allows a node to receive from multiple senders. In
CDMA each node is assigned a unique code sequence for its transmission. A
node spreads out its data over the entire channel bandwidth using its code
sequence. The receiver's job is to dispread the bits and extracts only the data
from the desired sender. Although CDMA allows transmissions to occupy
the entire bandwidth of the channel at the same time, the special coding
mechanism narrows the bandwidth for the node’s data. Therefore, as in
FDMA, Ttx is extended. In addition to the complexity of the transceiver’s
circuit in this schema, each node has to know the code sequences of potential
senders. In a multi-hop networks, a node relays data and thus needs large
memory to tabulate the codes of most if not all other nodes.
CSMA: TDMA, FDMA and CDMA are contention-free schemes in which
nodes are assigned to channels that are partitioned (i.e., in time, frequency,
or code space) to avoid collisions. On the contrary, CSMA is a contention-
based MAC scheme30. In CSMA, each node is required to keep sensing the
medium searching for a free channel for its transmission. When a node has
packet to send, it transmit at the full channel bandwidth. No a priori
coordination among nodes or synchronized clocks is required in this scheme.
Using CSMA forces nodes to be awake for longer time and consequently
boosts their energy consumption. In addition, data transmissions suffer from
high collisions in dense networks. Increased collisions among nodes make
the transmission delay unpredictable and can lead to high rate of packet
drops. On the other hand, CSMA based medium arbitration is autonomous
and does not require external control. The use of directional antennas has
been shown to significantly enhance the performance of CSMA31.

3. MAC-LAYER ISSUES FOR SENSOR NETWORKS

In this section, we analyze the technical considerations for designing

efficient MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks. We first outline the
design goals and then build on the analysis of energy consumption models
for radio circuitries, discussed in section 2, to highlight the energy-related
trade-offs and enumerate some of the popular performance metrics.
#9. Energy efficient MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks 7

3.1 Design Goals for Efficient MAC Protocols

In this subsection we briefly discuss the main design goals for the MAC
protocols of sensor networks. As will become clear, some of these goals may
be conflicting and may force a trade-off.
• Scalability: It is envisioned that most applications of unattended sensor
networks will involve large number of nodes. Therefore, scalability of the
employed protocols is crucial. The resources, i.e. time and bandwidth,
sharing method and the arbitration strategy have to allow for fair access
to the medium and to prevent excessive collisions. In addition, the
potential for large set of communicating nodes would impose a restriction
on the use of some MAC schemes such as CDMA. In almost all sensor
networks, nodes relay other sensors’ data and can even perform data
aggregation. Pursuing a pure CDMA scheme would require a sensor to
store many code sequences, which may be impractical for tiny sensor
devices with very limited computational resources.
It is worth noting that the scalability of the link layer protocols is
influenced by the network architecture and routing methodology.
Hierarchical network structures can allow the employment of multiple
resource sharing strategies and shape the network flow into patterns that
can be exploited at the link layer. For example, grouping sensors into
disjoint clusters allows designating non-overlapping frequency bands to
clusters, similar to FDMA, and applying a TDMA or CSMA schemes for
intra-cluster communication among sensors. In addition, the
methodology for route setup can rule out some MAC schemes. For
example, flooding-style data dissemination makes time-based medium
arbitration strategy impractical.
• Delay-predictability: A number of applications of sensor networks such
as target tracking require delay-bounded delivery of data. Ensuing
timeliness of data reception is typically handled at multiple layers in the
communication stack. For example, special consideration at the network
layer would alleviate the burden of long queuing time that affect the
overall end-to-end delay32-34. However, the link-layer would play a major
role through careful packet scheduling and predictable strategy for
medium arbitration.
The employed MAC scheme determines the schedule for packet
transmission not only for the individual node but for the entire network.
At the node level, a suitable packet classification and priority mechanism
is the base for a service differentiation that allows delay centric handling
of out-going packets. On the network level, a well defined and easily
enforced strategy is needed to prevent inter-node competition for
medium access from causing contention that makes the time for packet
8 Chapter #9

transmission and reception non-deterministic. For example, collision

based medium arbitration mechanisms such as CSMA would not be
appropriate for large and densely populated sensor networks since it is
not known how many times a node will back off until it successfully
transmit. On the other, reservation based approaches such as TDMA
would be a good match despite their scalability problems.
• Adaptability: In most applications of sensor networks traffic density
varies significantly over time and from part of the network to another.
Such observation is valid for both event-triggered and query-based
models of network operation1,3,6. For example in a forest monitoring
setup only periodic status updates are sent in normal conditions while
many sensor reports are generated in case of detecting a fire. In a typical
query-based operation, sensors transmit only in response to requests and
little traffic is generated otherwise.
In addition, generated data can be subject to aggregation on route to
the sink. Data aggregation can take the form of averaging the reported
data, picking the maximum value, removal of redundant report, etc.1,10,11.
In some cases the traffic pattern will not change if the aggregating nodes
are fixed at the time of route setup and the transformation of the data is
many-to-one, e.g. averaging multiple readings. However, data
aggregation is mostly performed when applicable and thus can cause
variability in the traffic flow. For example, elimination of redundant
sensor readings filters out repetitions and prevents resource wastage.
Needless to say that dropping the packets of unneeded data depends on
the type of sensors and the detected events. The MAC scheme should
adapt to such high fluctuation in traffic and should allow medium access
rescheduling to efficiently handle burst high-priority traffic.
• Energy-efficiency: Energy is a scarce resource for sensor networks. As
explained earlier, medium access is a major consumer of sensor energy,
especially for long-range transmission and when the radio receiver is kept
on all the time. The output power of the radio transmitter is directly
proportional to distance squared and can significantly magnify in a noisy
environment. Energy-aware routing typically pursues multi-hop paths in
order to optimize the transmission energy10-14.
On the other hand, energy-conscious medium access control (MAC)
can save transmission and reception energy by limiting the potential for
collisions, minimizing the use of control messages, utilizing most of the
available frequency band to shorten the transmission time, turning the
radio into low power sleep mode when it is idle and finally, avoiding the
excessive transitions among active and sleep states.
#9. Energy efficient MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks 9

• Reliability: Reliable delivery of data is a classical design goal for all

network infrastructures. Guaranteed packet delivery is ensured by the
careful selection of error free links, avoidance of overloaded nodes, and
the detection and the recovery from packet drops. There is usually a
trade-off between the control traffic overhead and the level of reliability.
For example, acknowledging each packet minimizes the recovery time
and limits its scope, at the price of a high control traffic that can lower
the effective link bandwidth, boost end-to-end delay and increase energy
consumption.
In wireless networks, packet drops are mainly caused by buffer
overflow and signal interference. Avoiding buffer overflow is the
responsibility of both the routing and the MAC protocols. Balancing
load among available routes would reduce the potential for reaching the
maximum capacity of the in-bound traffic buffer in relay nodes.
Meanwhile, the employed medium arbitration scheme determines the
buffer management strategy and has to ensure a service rate for the out-
bound flow that is high enough to stop the number of backlogged
packets from exceeding the maximum buffer size. Packet drops due to
signal interference can be minimized through the use of sufficiently high
transmission power and the prevention of contention for medium access
among nodes.

3.2 Energy Trade-offs and Metrics

Based on the described design goals for MAC protocols in wireless

sensor networks, in this subsection we highlight sample conflicts among
some of these goals with respect to the utilization of sensor’s energy and
enumerate a list of metrics that can be used to assess the performance of
MAC protocols.
Energy Trade-offs: Based on the earlier discussion about the qualify
attributes of MAC protocols for sensors networks, one can guess that it is
difficult to find a protocol that can be very scalable, extremely energy-
efficient, flexible and highly adaptable, robust with reliable packet delivery
and predictable with bounded delay. Therefore, it is expected that these
attributes will be valued differently in the various applications of sensor
networks. However, energy efficiency would probably stay among the top
attributes given the constrained sensor’s energy supply in unattended
deployments. The following is a sample of the trade-offs that the designers
would encounter with respect to energy when picking an appropriate MAC
protocol:
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• While our analysis of the design goals has indicated that contention-
based MAC protocols are disfavored due to scalability concerns, delay
unpredictability, high signal interference and increased potential for
energy wastage in collisions, they still fits well for ad-hoc network
formation. In fact the lack of centralized coordination and the complexity
of resource partitioning in many sensor network architectures make
contention-based approaches one of the attractive choices.
• One of the approaches for energy saving is to switch the radio circuitry to
sleep in order to avoid energy wastage while staying in idle mode and to
limit the number of transitions between sleep and active modes.
However, to take advantage of such opportunities for energy reduction
the link-layer should pursue a time-based medium sharing, e.g. TDMA,
with accurate clock synchronization so that state transitions can be
appropriately scheduled. An alternative is to use separate channels for
data and control messages which requires two radios. While TDMA and
similar approaches prevent medium contention and make the end-to-end
delay deterministic in addition to their energy advantage, they are not
suitable for many applications of sensor networks. Time-based medium
sharing does not scale well since the problem of scheduling time slots
subject to flow constraints is NP-hard. In addition, time-based
approaches are often slow to adapt to changes in the traffic flow and
density since control messages have to be prescheduled.
• Despite the fact that CDMA is a good match for most of the design goals
of the sensor networks in terms of collision avoidance, adaptability, and
the support of bounded delay, the resources required for implementing
CDMA can over-burden the design of sensors. For example, it is not
expected that sensors would have large memory that can be designated to
storing the codes of all deployed sensors and just limits the scalability of
CDMA. In addition, the bit encoding of CDMA extends the transmission
time of a message and thus increase energy consumption. Finally, the
complexity and cost of the radio circuitry can also be an issue especially
for largely miniaturized implementations and for disposable use of
inexpensive sensors. The designer would have to give up some of the
CDMA characteristics such as the uniqueness and the length of the
employed codes, in order to allow feasible implementation on tiny sensor
nodes and to maintain a conservative usage of sensor’s energy.
Again the balanced emphasis of the design goals would have to be based on
application requirements.
MAC’s Performance Metrics: To assess and compare the performance of
energy-conscious MAC protocols, the following mix of metrics has been
deemed indicative by the research community:
#9. Energy efficient MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks 11

¾ Ratio of energy wastage to total communication energy: This metric

measures the efficiency of energy utilization. A protocol with low
overhead, few collisions and little idle time would demonstrate small
ratio of energy wastage.
¾ Average consumed energy-per packet: This metric is dedicated to
assessing the quality of active mode operations. A protocol that has low
average energy per packet typically encounters few packet
retransmissions and suffers little contention-related collisions. It is worth
noting that the use of this metric to capture the performance of the MAC
protocol should exclude the effect of the output power which is
proportional to distance and is usually influenced by route setup.
¾ Average and standard deviation of node lifetime: Since the usefulness of
the sensor network depends on the availability of sufficiently large
number of sensors to cover the area of interest, extending the lifetime of
a sensor node is very important. This metric gives a good measure of the
overall network lifetime. A slow depletion rate extends the life of the
sensor battery and lengthens the duration that a sensor can function.
Minimizing the standard deviation of node life makes the sensor
coverage and the network connectivity more predictable. It should be
noted that many other factors such as the date routing mechanism and
the selection of active sensor contribute to this metric. However, an
energy inefficient MAC protocol can still have a noticeable negative
effect.
¾ Error rate: Packet drops are mainly caused by buffer overflow and
signal interference. A MAC protocol, which observes the buffer size
limitations and employ an effective packet scheduling at the node and
network level, would minimize packet drops. In addition, signal
interference can lead to low signal to noise ratios and hinder the
recipient’s ability in decoding the transmitted packet. MAC protocols
that reduce the potential for collisions among nodes would suffer fewer
packet decoding errors.
¾ Network Throughput: Defined as the total number of packets received at
the sink per time unit. Many factors, e.g. the setup of the network
topology, affect this metric and not just the choice of the MAC protocol.
However, the contribution of the MAC protocol is very significant. A
high network throughput indicates a small error rate for packet
transmission and a low level of contention for medium access.
12 Chapter #9

4. STATE OF THE RESEARCH

Contemporary MAC layer protocols designed for wireless devices such

as MACAW35 and IEEE 802.1136 are not suitable for sensor networks. These
schemes will consume considerable amount of energy since they require the
sensors to continuously probe the medium. In addition, these schemes
require nodes to transmit control packets in order to avoid collisions. The
control packet sizes will be comparable to the size of data packets, which are
small in most sensor applications. On the other hand, Bluetooth37 uses a
TDMA based scheme assuming that all slave nodes are within transmission
range of the master node, and thus it cannot handle the multi-hop mode of
transmission usually employed in sensor networks for saving energy.
Power management of the radio has gained significant importance in
sensor networks since the radio is a major consumer of sensor’s energy38,39.
Several methods have been suggested to reduce the energy consumption of
the RF circuitry in light of the energy consumption model described in
section 2. Energy-conscious MAC protocols for sensor networks found in
the literature can be broadly classified into two categories: contention and
reservation based protocols. In this section we report on some of the pursued
techniques in each category. In should be noted that we do not discuss the
MAC protocols for sensor networks, which have paid little attention to
energy while focusing on other performance metrics like timeliness40,41.

4.1 Contention Based Protocols

Contention based MAC protocols have been the main choice for
distributed sensor architectures where the network infrastructure and access
points are not well-defined. Most of the contention based MAC protocols
proposed in the literature follow the operational model of CSMA,
incorporating handshaking signals and a back-off mechanism to reduce the
probability of collisions. However, the pursued techniques for energy
conservation vary. Some focus on the energy wastage due to collisions
suggesting clever power control to limit the level of interference, the use of
different channels for data and control traffic, etc. Other published work
exploit the energy saving through shortening the time a radio circuitry
spends in idle mode. In this subsection we discuss the basic idea of some of
these techniques.
SmartNode: The SmartNode MAC protocol42 extends the IEEE 802.11
standards. Nodes in the SmartNode network attempt to derive the minimum
transmission power to reach the other nodes from the power strengths of
received packets. Each node in SmartNode system maintains a lookup table
to store the unique identifiers of the neighbors it knows about with the
#9. Energy efficient MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks 13

minimum transmission powers required to reach those neighbors. Before a

source node transmits a data packet, it looks up for the destination node in
the table. If the lookup fails, the source node transmits the ready-to-send
(RTS) packet with maximum power level; otherwise, the value stored in the
lookup table is used for setting the power level of the RTS packet. An
additional field is added to the RTS packet to store the used transmission
power. On overhearing the RTS packet, each neighbor node estimates the
minimum transmission power required and stores such value in its lookup
table. In order to maintain compatibility with 802.11, the destination node
transmits unmodified clear-to-send (CTS) packet with the same power level
indicated in the RTS packet. Hence, the source node is then able to
determine the minimum transmission power required for the data packet to
reach the destination node and store such value in its lookup table. Although
SmartNode reduces the power transmission level that saves energy, it has
some disadvantages. SmartNode still consumes energy for the RTS/CTS
control packets transmissions. In addition, using different transmission
power levels increases the collision rate in the network43. Fairness is another
problem in SmartNode because data packets are transmitted with low power
making it easy for them to get corrupted and dropped. It is worth noting that
variant of this power control scheme were pursed in PCM43, PCMA44,
DBTMA45, among others.
PAMAS: The Power Aware Medium Access protocol and Signaling
(PAMAS)16 is a CSMA based protocol in which the nodes that are not
actively transmitting or receiving should power themselves off. The
approach requires the nodes to use two separate channels for control and
data. The control channel is used for handshaking and the data channel for
regular traffic. Using two channels minimizes the potential for collisions. A
node senses the data channel and responds to connection requests only if its
neighbors are not transmitting or receiving. Senders that cannot establish a
connection switch to sleep mode and retry later. The duration of a node stay
in the sleep mode is determined based on the exchange of special probe
messages on the control channel among nodes in close proximity. Switching
nodes that are not participating in communication to a sleep mode has been
shown to result in energy savings of up to 70%. However the protocol
requires the nodes to sense the medium to transmit and does not eliminate
collisions completely. In addition the protocol requires the nodes to have two
separate channels (control and data), which will require two radios at each
node increasing the cost, size and complexity of the sensor design.
S-MAC: The sensor-MAC26 (or S-MAC) is a contention-based protocol
proposed for energy-constrained networked devices. The S-MAC protocol
essentially trades energy for throughput and latency by utilizing the sleep
mode of the radio. Basically nodes are switched to the sleep mode for
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scheduled periods of time. When a node becomes active, it transmits its ID

indicting its readiness to receive messages. A sender has to wait for hearing
the ID of the receiver node prior to transmission. It is worth noting that a
similar mechanism is pursued for Piconet46. If multiple senders were waiting,
they have to contend for connection with the receiver node. Nodes share
their sleep schedules in order to prevent a sender from spending excessive
idle time awaiting a receiver to become active. Relative timestamps are
exchanged to mitigate the effect for clock drifts. Throughput is reduced since
only the active part of the frame is used for communication. Latency
increases because a message-generating event may occur during sleep time
and will be queued until the start of the next active part. In addition to
latency, this approach sacrifices per hop fairness. T-MAC20 extends S-MAC
by dynamically adjusting the duration between sleep intervals in which
sensors are awake based on communication of nearby neighbors. In order to
reduce number for switching, T-MAC introduced additional overhead
control packets to prevent nodes from early sleep switching. However, the
scalability of the S-MAC (and the T-MAC) is questionable. The scheduling
of sleep time can be an over-burden in large networks and the end-to-end
delay for packet delivery can be unpredictable.
DPSM: The Dynamic Power Saving Mechanism47 is proposed by Jung and
Vaidya to enhance the energy consumption of the IEEE 802.11 MAC
protocol. One of the medium arbitration modes of the IEEE 802.11 standard
is the distributed coordination function in which nodes content to establish
connections. Time is divided into beacon intervals; each starts with a fixed
size time window in which nodes announce any packets pending
transmission to nodes. Nodes that are not transmitting or receiving can enter
a low-power doze mode. The DPSM approach further increases the time a
node spent in the doze state by dynamically determining the window size
based on the node backlog and receiving activities in the previous interval.
Assuming synchronized clocks, nodes exchange the size of their active
window so that a sender does not wait unpredictably for a dozing receiver. In
addition, the DPSM approach further qualify the effectiveness of switching
to the doze mode by ensuring that the transition between the doze and active
states is not going to drain more energy than the savings achieved in the
doze mode. The main concern with DPSM is its scalability for large
networks with dense deployment. In addition, one would argue that the
required clock synchronization of all nodes does not fit the nature of a
CSMA protocol.
Adaptive transmission rate: A CSMA-based MAC protocol with an adaptive
rate control mechanism is proposed by Woo and Culler for sensor
networks48. In such protocol a node that has a data packet to transmit, senses
the medium for a random period of time. If the medium is idle during this
#9. Energy efficient MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks 15

period, a channel reservation process using simple RTS/CTS control packets

is started. Otherwise, the node applies a binary exponential back-off scheme
and then retries the transmission. During the back-off period, the node does
not have to keep sensing the medium and it can turn off its radio to conserve
energy. In addition, the protocol eliminates data ACK packets to further
reduce energy consumption. To decrease the probability of collisions among
nodes that detects the same event, each node upon detecting the event
applies a random delay before starting the transmission process. A passive
rate control mechanism is used to maintain fair bandwidth for both the
originating data of a node and the route-thru traffic that passes through it.
Basically, each node periodically attempts to inject a packet into the
network. When that packet is successfully injected, it signals that the road
still has capacity for more traffic and thus, the node can increase its
transmission rate linearly. However if the injection of that packet was not
successful, it signals that the road is jammed and the node decreases its rate
of originating data using a multiplicative scheme. Route-thru traffic will
adapt to the traffic of the original data using a similar mechanism. If a node
injects lots of original traffic into the freeway, the route-thru traffic will be
hindered and thus, the rate of transmitting route-thru traffic will decrease.
This decrease will propagate deep down into the network which ultimately
decreases the amount of aggregate route-thru traffic. While the approach
limits collisions and strives to maintain fair bandwidth splitting among
nodes, energy conservation is limited in scope. The issues of overhearing
and minimizing time the radio is in idle mode are not addressed.

4.2 Reservation Based Protocols

Time based medium access has the potential of capturing most of the
opportunities for energy optimization in sensor networks. As discussed in
section 2, energy wastage due to overhearing, collision, idle mode and
transitions between different states can be minimized if the medium access is
shared on a time basis. In addition, time based medium arbitration can
enhance delay predictability and limit packet drops due to interference and
buffer overflow. However, the problem of scheduling access to the medium
is NP-hard making the scalability of time based MAC scheme a major
concern. Moreover, distributed time based medium arbitration typically
introduces excessive overhead. In addition, maintaining clock synchrony
among nodes is essential to enforce the schedule which is a non-trivial
problem for the resource-constrained sensor nodes. Most of the time based
MAC protocols proposed in the literature have focused on addressing these
issues either using reservation requests over preset data routes or pursuing
16 Chapter #9

simplified heuristics to tackle the complexity of medium access scheduling.

This subsection summarizes some of the published techniques.
Clock Synchronization: To capture the advantages of a TDMA based scheme
nodes should be synchronized. Typically, in sensor networks only the
sensors that are performing some function are active at any point of time.
Thus, in order to receive a synchronization message many sensors will have
to switch on their radios. This will consume considerable amount of energy.
Moreover, if the frequency of synchronization messages is large, the energy
resources of the sensors will further diminish. Elson and Romer49 have
argued that conventional synchronization schemes like NTP will consume a
lot of energy in passive listening and hence are not suitable for sensor
networks. It has been further concluded that no single scheme is suitable for
sensor networks and the networks should adapt the synchronization scheme
based upon the application. Though they have described the characteristics
of what would be a good synchronization scheme for sensor networks, they
have not explicitly proposed one.
Jolly and Younis50 have proposed an approach for centralized network
management setup where the sink establishes the routes and schedule the
sensor’s transmission. The basic idea is to take advantage of the flow of
routing traffic from the sink and include a reference clock value. Since all
the sensors have to switch on to receive route and schedule update, the
overhead that the sensors would have incurred in switching on to listen to
synchronization messages will be eliminated. Because the frequency of route
updates for some networks may be insufficient to maintain the desired level
of clock synchronization, they have exploited the trade-off between the
guard-time and the frequency of resynchronization. The guard time is a
precautionary measure used to tolerate the difference in clock readings of
communicating nodes. Increasing the guard time will require a sensor node
to be activated earlier than its reception slot in order to tolerate a clock drift.
Single-Sink Setup: The use of reservation requests has been explored for
tackling the scalability of time-based medium arbitration51. Nodes that have
data to transmit make a reservation request to a base-station, which responds
with a traffic control message indicating medium access schedule. Nodes
that are not included in the traffic control message can turn off their radio
receivers. The nodes that have been assigned slots transmit in the order
scheduled by the base-station. The base-station trades off latency with
energy-efficiency. While it is better to bundle all transmissions from a node
in consecutive time slots, the transmission of other nodes will be delayed.
Arisha et al.,52 have pursued a non-reservation based approach that considers
the routing paths. A depth and breadth first strategies were investigated for
scheduling packets over a multi-hop paths. Their analysis has concluded that
in the absence of buffer size constraints, breadth first can be very energy
#9. Energy efficient MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks 17

efficient. While the focus on active routes limits the size of the scheduling
problem, relying on a single controller and ignoring buffer size constraints
raises concerns about applicability of these approaches for large networks.
Multi-Cluster Scheduling: Jolly and Younis50 have proposed a
comprehensive approach for energy-efficient time-base medium arbitration
in sensor networks. Scalability is achieved through network clustering.
Sensors are grouped around gateway nodes that are less energy constrained
than sensors. Each gateway is assigned the responsibility of cluster
management setting up multi-hop routes and assigning
transmission/reception slots to sensors. Time slots are assigned to
communicating sensors within the cluster to achieve efficient utilization of
the energy resources. A breadth-first based slot assignment heuristics is
suggested to conserve sensor’s energy by minimizing the number of
transition between active and sleep modes and the duration in which active
sensors are idle. Moreover, the slot assignment mechanism observes the
buffering limitation at sensor’s node in order to prevent packet drops.
The approach further boosts the effective network bandwidth by allowing
the transmissions within the different clusters to overlap. To avoid inter-
cluster interference, the slots assigned to nodes close to the cluster
boundaries are further analyzed to detect potential collisions. After each
gateway assign slots to sensors in its cluster, it broadcasts the transmission
schedule to peer gateways that manage other clusters. A gateway is elected
to perform the multi-cluster analysis in order to detect and resolve collision.
Gateways can rotate this responsibility to balance the load or use other
criteria. Collisions can be simply detected through the comparison of the
assignment of each time-slot in the different clusters and the transmission
range of the designated sensors. Resolving inter-cluster collisions can lead to
modifying the medium access schedule within the individual cluster in a way
that diminishes the intra-cluster MAC level efficiency. Alternative resolution
can be through the extension of the TDMA frame size, which may boost the
end-to-end latency. A simple heuristics has been proposed for minimizing
the impact of the inter-cluster collision resolution. Basically slots assigned to
routing trees within the same cluster are swapped in order to prevent the
overlap between the transmissions of boundary nodes. Fig. 9-1 illustrates the
proposed approach through an example.
18 Chapter #9

Tree1 11 Tree1
Cluster 1 10 Cluster 1 1
Tree2 Tree2 2
Tree3 12,13,14 Tree3 13,14, 3,4,5
15,16,
Tree4 1 G3
17 Tree4 9
G3
1
16,17 17 7,8
Tree5 5,6,7, 15 Tree5 6
2 18,19 10 2,3
8,9
Tree6 3 4 Tree6 11 12
2 4 2 4
7,8,9, 12 15,16,17 4
Tree7 1 Tree7 18,19
3 10,11 G1 1 3 G1
14,15, 6,7,8
Tree8 5,6,7 16 13 Tree8 5,6,7 5
G2 ,8,9 6 G2 ,8,9 14 11,12,
14,15, 3,4,5 Cluster 1 14,15, 13 Cluster 1
16,17 Cluster 2 16,17 Cluster 2
1 2 9
10
13 13
11,12 11,12

10 10

(a) (b)
Figure #9-1. Assigned transmission slots are annotated next to each node. Before applying the
inter-cluster collision avoidance heuristics in (a), the transmission of nodes on tree 4 interfere
with nodes on trees 1 and 6 and similarly for nodes on trees 3 and 7. Swapping the order of
slots allocated to trees in clusters 1and 3 eliminates the potential of collisions as shown in (b).

4.3 Hybrid Approaches

As discussed in section 2, each of CSMA, CDMA, FDMA and TDMA based

schemes offers some advantages and suffers some shortcomings with respect
to the requirements of MAC protocols for sensor networks. Not surprisingly
some researchers have tried combining multiple of these schemes in order to
better address these requirements. In this subsection, we briefly discuss a
sample of such protocols.
PARMAC: The Power-Aware Reservation based MAC (PARMAC)53 is an
energy-aware protocol primarily designed for ad hoc networks and is
applicable to sensor networks as well. The approach is actually a
combination of contention and reservation based medium arbitration
schemes. The network is divided into grids and each node is assumed to
reach all the other nodes within its grid. Time is divided into fixed frames.
Grids are assigned distinct frames. Each frame is composed of Reservation
Period (RP) and Contention Free Period (CFP). In each RP, nodes within a
grid cell exchange 3 messages to reserve the slots for data transmission and
reception and the exchange of acknowledgements. Data is then sent in the
CFP. The clocks of all nodes are assumed to be synchronized. The protocol
saves energy by minimizing the idle time of the nodes and allowing the
nodes to sleep during a CFP. Moreover, intra-grid control packets overhead
and packet retransmissions are minimal, achieving significant energy
savings. However, inter-grid contention is still possible and the efficiency of
#9. Energy efficient MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks 19

this approach can significantly diminish if the application requires data

exchange among nodes in different grids.
DEANA: The Distributed Energy-Aware Node Activation (DEANA)54
approach exploits the node’s awareness of its neighbors in scheduling
transmissions in a non-contending way. A single signaling channel is used
and medium is arbitrated in a time-sharing manner. The protocol follows two
cycles; a scheduled-access cycle used for data and a random-access cycle.
The latter is used for neighbor discovery in case nodes are relocated or a
node is added/removed from the network. The scheduled-access cycle are
partitioned into time slots for node’s transmission. Each time slot is further
split into control and data partitions. Nodes contend for time slots. The node
that is allocated the slot will use the control potion to broadcast the receiver
ID and then follow on with the data. The identified receiver will stay on and
the other neighbor nodes will transition to a low-power sleep mode. Again
the clocks of all nodes are assumed to be synchronized. However, the
DEANA approach does not consider the state transition energy in the
decision of whether to switch to the sleep mode or not. In addition, in a
dense node deployment the protocol can be unpredictable since the set of
neighbors will be large making it hard to expect the outcome of the
contention for slots.
Self-Organizing Sensor Networks: A self organization mechanism using a
contention-free TDMA medium access protocol is proposed for sensor
networks by Sohrabi and Pottie55. At the beginning nodes operate in random
access mode for booting up the network. In this mode each node listens for
other nodes on a fixed channel. When the first node is found, a two node
sub-net network is formed and a new TDMA schedule is formed. The sub-
nets continue to grow as they find new unattached nodes or merge with other
sub-nets. Existing TDMA schedules are modified to accommodate the new
formed sub-nets. After the boot-up period, nodes switch to a TDMA mode in
which they follow their own local schedule and go through a sequence of
transmission and reception bursts. In order to make the system scalable, no
central entity and no global TDMA schedule are required. Therefore, a node
can experience interferences from other nodes that selected the same
transmission slots locally. To alleviate such problem, multiple separate
channels, i.e. different frequencies (FDMA) or distinct spreading codes
(CDMA), are used and each node randomly chooses one of those channels
for its transmissions.
20 Chapter #9

5. CONCLUSION AND OPEN RESEARCH ISSUES

Wireless sensor networks have been drawing increased attention in recent

years. Sensors in such systems are typically disposable and expected to last
until their energy drains. Therefore, energy is a very scarce resource for such
sensor systems and has to be managed wisely in order to extend the life of
the sensors for the duration of a particular mission. Energy conservation is
generally targeted at all layers of communication stack. This chapter has
been dedicated to the link layer analyzing the requirements, identifying
energy-related design parameters, exploring trade-offs and reporting on
advances made in the research community.
Generally, an efficient MAC layer protocol for sensor networks should
have the following characteristics:
• The protocol should be scalable since most applications of sensor
networks involve a large set of sensor nodes.
• Collision among the transmissions of various nodes should be avoided.
Collisions lead to packet drop and thus reduce throughput and cause
energy wastage.
• Energy consumed by the radio circuit in idle mode is almost equal to that
consumed in active state. Consequently, idle mode of operation and
transmission overhearing among sensors should be minimized.
• To limit energy consumption during idle time, the sensors are typically
switched to a sleep mode when not in use. However, active to sleep
transitions and vice-versa consume considerable amount of energy.
Therefore, an efficient protocol should minimize such transitions.
• The protocol should minimize overhead. For example, control packets
overhead and active sensing of the medium, typically performed by
contention-based protocols, are inefficient in terms of energy
consumption.
• Packet drop due to limited buffer capacity should be prevented.
• The protocol should adapt to changes in the network topology and all
sensors should have a fair chance of transmitting.
• Transmission of messages should be reliably handled while striving to
maintain bounded latency.
Most published work has tried to address few of these design goals,
leaving lots of room for future research. For example, the analysis and
discussion in this chapter have made it clear that there is no ideal strategy for
resource sharing and medium access arbitration. We envision the pursuance
of hybrid approaches to be the most promising design methodology. While
there have been few attempts such as those summarized in section 4.3,
extensive research is required to address the above efficiency requirements
in a comprehensive way. Scalability issues are most notable among possible
#9. Energy efficient MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks 21

future research directions given the growing ambition for very large
deployments of tiny sensors and the widening scope of use in many
application domains.
Other avenues for research include the combined handling for QoS and
energy constraints and the development of innovative radio designs that
balance the desire for flexibility and robustness while maintaining acceptable
circuit’s complexity. For example, little effort has been dedicated to
exploring the effect of the directional antenna on the performance of sensor
networks. Directional antennas can increase the spatial reusability of the
medium and limit the scope of the overhearing problem.

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