A Survey on Medium Access Control (MAC) for Clustering Wireless Sensor Network
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paper_title: Meta-survey on medium access control surveys in wireless sensor networks

paper_content:

Medium access control layer has been the hotbed of research in the field of wireless sensor networks since huge amount of research in wireless sensor networks has focused on saving energy and lately reducing latency. For the most part, medium access control layer solutions in wireless sensor networks are entrusted to save energy, to reduce latency, and at times to ensure reliability perhaps through cross-layer solutions. In this article, we review the surveys at medium access control layer and point to readers some of their strengths and relevancies to medium access control layer protocols. Furthermore, we classify the surveys subject-wise to show trend and usability. To cross compare, we devise a unified lexicon for the purpose and expose the coverage given to the wireless sensor networks’ medium access control protocols by different studies. We present medium access control solutions’ popularity on a known but hitherto unused metric: average citations/year from over 200 medium access control solutions. ...
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paper_title: Routing Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

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Wireless sensor networks consist of small nodes with sensing, computation, and wireless communications capabilities. Many routing, power management, and data dissemination protocols have been specifically designed for WSNs where energy awareness is an essential design issue. Routing protocols in WSNs might differ depending on the application and network architecture. In this article we present a survey of state-of-the-art routing techniques in WSNs. We first outline the design challenges for routing protocols in WSNs followed by a comprehensive survey of routing techniques. Overall, the routing techniques are classified into three categories based on the underlying network structure: flit, hierarchical, and location-based routing. Furthermore, these protocols can be classified into multipath-based, query-based, negotiation-based, QoS-based, and coherent-based depending on the protocol operation. We study the design trade-offs between energy and communication overhead savings in every routing paradigm. We also highlight the advantages and performance issues of each routing technique. The article concludes with possible future research areas.
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paper_title: QTSAC: An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Delay Minimization in Wireless Sensor Networks

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Millions of sensors are deployed to monitor the smart grid. They consume huge amounts of energy in the communication infrastructure. Therefore, the establishment of an energy-efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol for sensor nodes is challenging and urgently needed. The Quorum-based MAC protocol independently and adaptively schedules nodes’ wake-up times and decreases idle listening and collisions, thereby increasing the network throughput and extending the network lifetime. A novel Quorum time slot adaptive condensing (QTSAC)-based MAC protocol is proposed for achieving delay minimization and energy efficiency for the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Compared to previous protocols, the QTSAC-based MAC protocol has two main novelties: 1) It selects more Quorum time slots (QTSs) than previous protocols in the area that is far from the sink according to the energy consumption in WSNs to decrease the network latency and 2) It allocates QTSs only when data are transmitted to further decrease the network latency. Theoretical analyses and experimental results indicate that the QTSAS protocol can greatly improve network performance compared with existing Quorum-based MAC protocols. For intermediate-scale wireless sensor networks, the method that is proposed in this paper can enhance the energy efficiency by 24.64%–82.75%, prolong the network lifetime by 58%–27.31%, and lower the network latency by 3.59%–29.23%.
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paper_title: WiSeN: A new sensor node for smart applications with wireless sensor networks

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Abstract Although the field application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is widely varied, their use in practice is nominal due to the fact that existing sensor nodes do not meet necessary requirements, which are sensor integration with nodes and sending of sensed information to remote stations. In fact, sensor nodes face a number of challenges, such as scripts that cannot be fully changed, network routing algorithms not being written, and not receiving data from the most sensors. Therefore, a new sensor node has been developed (called WiSeN) which aims to be usable in all WSN applications. WiSeN has been developed for unlimited numbers and multiple types of sensors that can be connected, and it was designed to create a new and user-friendly alternative to sensors currently being used.
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paper_title: Design guidelines for wireless sensor networks: communication, clustering and aggregation

paper_content:

Abstract When sensor nodes are organized in clusters, they could use either single hop or multi-hop mode of communication to send their data to their respective cluster heads. We present a systematic cost-based analysis of both the modes, and provide results that could serve as guidelines to decide which mode should be used for given settings. We determine closed form expressions for the required number of cluster heads and the required battery energy of nodes for both the modes. We also propose a hybrid communication mode which is a combination of single hop and multi-hop modes, and which is more cost-effective than either of the two modes. Our problem formulation also allows for the application to be taken into account in the overall design problem through a data aggregation model.
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paper_title: MAC Protocols With Wake-Up Radio for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Review

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The use of a low-power wake-up radio in wireless sensor networks is considered in this paper, where relevant medium access control solutions are studied. A variety of asynchronous wake-up MAC protocols have been proposed in the literature, which take advantage of integrating a second radio to the main one for waking it up. However, a complete and a comprehensive survey particularly on these protocols is missing in the literature. This paper aims at filling this gap, proposing a relevant taxonomy, and providing deep analysis and discussions. From both perspectives of energy efficiency and latency reduction, as well as their operation principles, state-of-the-art wake-up MAC protocols are grouped into three main categories: 1) duty cycled wake-up MAC protocols; 2) non-cycled wake-up protocols; and 3) path reservation wake-up protocols. The first category includes two subcategories: 1) static wake-up protocols versus 2) traffic adaptive wake-up protocols. Non-cycled wake-up MAC protocols are again divided into two classes: 1) always-on wake-up protocol and 2) radio-triggered wake-up protocols. The latter is in turn split into two subclasses: 1) passive wake-up MAC protocols versus 2) ultra low power active wake-up MAC protocols. Two schemes could be identified for the last category, 1) broadcast based wake-up versus 2) addressing based wake-up. All these classes are discussed and analyzed in this paper, and canonical protocols are investigated following the proposed taxonomy.
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paper_title: MAC Protocols Used by Wireless Sensor Networks and a General Method of Performance Evaluation

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Many researchers employ IEEE802.15.4 as communication technology for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, medium access control (MAC) layer requirements for communications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) vary because the network is usually optimized for specific applications. Thus, one particular standard will hardly be suitable for every possible application. Two general categories of MAC techniques exist: contention based and schedule based. This paper explains these two main approaches and includes examples of each one. The paper concludes with a unique performance analysis and comparison of benefits and limitations of each protocol with respect to WSNs.
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paper_title: Energy Saving Mechanisms for MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

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Energy efficiency is a primary requirement in a wireless sensor network (WSN). This is a major design parameter in medium access control (MAC) protocols for WSN due to limited resources in sensor nodes that include low battery power. Hence a proposed MAC protocol must be energy efficient by reducing the potential energy wastes. Developing such a MAC protocol has been a hot research area in WSN. To avoid wasting the limited energy, various energy saving mechanisms are proposed for MAC protocols. These mechanisms have a common design objective—to save energy to maximize the network lifetime. This paper presents a survey on various energy saving mechanisms that are proposed for MAC protocols in WSN. We present a detailed discussion of these mechanisms and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. We also discuss MAC protocols that use these energy saving mechanisms.
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paper_title: A comparative study on popular MAC protocols for mixed Wireless Sensor Networks: From implementation viewpoint

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Abstract Sensors cooperate and coordinate with each other to disseminate sensed data in the network. In establishing coordination among sensors such that they can access the shared wireless medium, Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol plays an important role. In this article, we presented an analytical study on some popular MAC protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Based on the design techniques, MAC protocols for WSNs are classified into two main categories: single-layer and cross-layer. MAC protocols such as S-MAC, T-MAC, B-MAC and X-MAC are selected to study the design approaches of single-layer genre. BoX-MAC-1 and BoX-MAC-2 are selected to analyze cross-layer design approaches. This survey paper aims at reporting an implementation viewpoint of different design approaches of MAC protocols in WSN. We have considered mixed WSNs that exhibits node movement (e.g., static, mobile) and changes in communication medium (e.g., air, water). Representative protocols are implemented in Castalia simulator and evaluated on the basis of important performance metrics such as energy consumption, network lifetime, throughput and end-to-end delay. The merits and demerits of different protocols are also compared.
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paper_title: A Survey on Real-Time MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

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As wireless sensor network becomes pervasive, new requirements have been continuously emerged. How-ever, the most of research efforts in wireless sensor network are focused on energy problem since the nodes are usually battery-powered. Among these requirements, real-time communication is one of the big research challenges in wireless sensor networks because most of query messages carry time information. To meet this requirement, recently several real-time medium access control protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks in the literature because waiting time to share medium on each node is one of main source for end-to-end delay. In this paper, we first introduce the specific requirement of wireless sensor real-time MAC protocol. Then, a collection of recent wireless sensor real-time MAC protocols are surveyed, classified, and described emphasizing their advantages and disadvantages whenever possible. Finally we present a dis-cussion about the challenges of current wireless sensor real-time MAC protocols in the literature, and show the conclusion in the end.
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paper_title: MAC Essentials for Wireless Sensor Networks

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The wireless medium being inherently broadcast in nature and hence prone to interferences requires highly optimized medium access control (MAC) protocols. This holds particularly true for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consisting of a large amount of miniaturized battery-powered wireless networked sensors required to operate for years with no human intervention. There has hence been a growing interest on understanding and optimizing WSN MAC protocols in recent years, where the limited and constrained resources have driven research towards primarily reducing energy consumption of MAC functionalities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive state-of-the-art study in which we thoroughly expose the prime focus of WSN MAC protocols, design guidelines that inspired these protocols, as well as drawbacks and shortcomings of the existing solutions and how existing and emerging technology will influence future solutions. In contrast to previous surveys that focused on classifying MAC protocols according to the technique being used, we provide a thematic taxonomy in which protocols are classified according to the problems dealt with. We also show that a key element in selecting a suitable solution for a particular situation is mainly driven by the statistical properties of the generated traffic.
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paper_title: Meta-survey on medium access control surveys in wireless sensor networks

paper_content:

Medium access control layer has been the hotbed of research in the field of wireless sensor networks since huge amount of research in wireless sensor networks has focused on saving energy and lately reducing latency. For the most part, medium access control layer solutions in wireless sensor networks are entrusted to save energy, to reduce latency, and at times to ensure reliability perhaps through cross-layer solutions. In this article, we review the surveys at medium access control layer and point to readers some of their strengths and relevancies to medium access control layer protocols. Furthermore, we classify the surveys subject-wise to show trend and usability. To cross compare, we devise a unified lexicon for the purpose and expose the coverage given to the wireless sensor networks’ medium access control protocols by different studies. We present medium access control solutions’ popularity on a known but hitherto unused metric: average citations/year from over 200 medium access control solutions. ...
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paper_title: The Evolution of MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

paper_content:

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become a leading solution in many important applications such as intrusion detection, target tracking, industrial automation, smart building and so on. Typically, a WSN consists of a large number of small, low-cost sensor nodes that are distributed in the target area for collecting data of interest. For a WSN to provide high throughput in an energy-efficient way, designing an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is of paramount importance because the MAC layer coordinates nodes' access to the shared wireless medium. To show the evolution of WSN MAC protocols, this article surveys the latest progresses in WSN MAC protocol designs over the period 2002-2011. In the early development stages, designers were mostly concerned with energy efficiency because sensor nodes are usually limited in power supply. Recently, new protocols are being developed to provide multi-task support and efficient delivery of bursty traffic. Therefore, research attention has turned back to throughput and delay. This article details the evolution of WSN MAC protocols in four categories: asynchronous, synchronous, frame-slotted, and multichannel. These designs are evaluated in terms of energy efficiency, data delivery performance, and overhead needed to maintain a protocol's mechanisms. With extensive analysis of the protocols many future directions are stated at the end of this survey. The performance of different classes of protocols could be substantially improved in future designs by taking into consideration the recent advances in technologies and application demands.
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paper_title: Energy efficiency of MAC protocols in low data rate wireless multimedia sensor networks: A comparative study

paper_content:

Some new application scenarios for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) such as urban resilience, smart house/building, smart agriculture and animal farming, among others, can be enhanced by adding multimedia sensors able to capture and transmit small multimedia samples such as still images or audio files. In these applications, Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) usually share two conflicting design goals. On the one hand, the goal of maximizing the network lifetime by saving energy, and on the other, the ability to successfully deliver packets to the sink. In this paper, we investigate the suitability of several WSNs MAC protocols from different categories for low data rate WMSNs by analyzing the effect of some network parameters, such as the sampling rate and the density of multimedia sensors on the energy consumption of nodes. First, we develop a general multi-class traffic model that allows us to integrate different types of sensors with different sampling rates. Then, we model, evaluate and compare the energy consumption of MAC protocols numerically. We illustrate how the MAC protocols put some constraints on network parameters like the sampling rates, the number of nodes, the size of the multimedia sample and the density of multimedia nodes in order to make collisions negligible and avoid long queuing delays. Numerical results show that in asynchronous MAC protocols, the receiver-initiated MAC protocols (RI-MAC and PW-MAC) consume less energy than the sender-initiated ones (B-MAC and X-MAC). B-MAC outperforms X-MAC when the sampling rates of multimedia nodes is very low and the polling periods are short. PW-MAC shows the lowest energy consumption between the selected asynchronous MAC protocols and it can be used in the considered WMSNs with a wider range of sampling rates. Regarding synchronous MAC protocols, results also show that they are only suitable for the considered WMSNs when the data rates are very low. In that situation, TreeMAC is the one that offers the lowest energy consumption in comparison to L-MAC and T-MAC. Finally, we compare the energy consumption of MAC protocols in four selected application scenarios related to Smart Cities and environment monitoring.
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paper_title: Survey of MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Energy being a key constraint in wireless sensor networks (WSN) became a significant area of interest for various researches in WSN. A lot of work on energy conservation at different layers of protocol stack is present till date, of which energy conservation at Medium access control (MAC) layer is catching a lot of attention. Researchers have proposed several protocols for energy conservation in WSN at MAC layer. This paper presents a survey on some of the popular MAC layer protocols. It also provides a brief analysis of these protocols which could be helpful in future work in this direction. This paper also provides a reference for further research in this area giving an insight on energy conservation at MAC layer.
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paper_title: A Survey on Energy Efficient Contention based and Hybrid MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Backgrounds/Objectives: Method/Statistical Analysis: The objective is to determine an energy efficient, MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. All the sensor nodes communicate through a Medium Access Protocol (MAC). Energy is wasted while communicating data among sensor nodes. Since wireless sensors nodes are unwired they do not have any means of external power supply and it is only battery operated. Hence designing energy efficient MAC Protocol to expand battery span is very important. A thorough survey on various contention based and hybrid protocols has been done in this paper. Findings: Hybrid MAC Protocol implements the combined advantages of CSMA and TDMA. A clear comparison of some of the best Hybrid MAC protocols and contention based protocols has been explained in this paper. Applications: Based on the performance of various MAC protocols, it is found that contention based MAC protocols can be implemented for low traffic level networks, hybrid MAC protocols can be implemented for high traffic level networks including industrial critical processes.
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paper_title: MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks: a survey

paper_content:

Wireless sensor networks are appealing to researchers due to their wide range of application potential in areas such as target detection and tracking, environmental monitoring, industrial process monitoring, and tactical systems. However, low sensing ranges result in dense networks and thus it becomes necessary to achieve an efficient medium-access protocol subject to power constraints. Various medium-access control (MAC) protocols with different objectives have been proposed for wireless sensor networks. In this article, we first outline the sensor network properties that are crucial for the design of MAC layer protocols. Then, we describe several MAC protocols proposed for sensor networks, emphasizing their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we point out open research issues with regard to MAC layer design.
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paper_title: Energy Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

paper_content:

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has gained tremendous popularity in various practical applications, in which sensors are fundamentally battery-powered and significantly resource-limited. Well-designed Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols can make great contribution on the performance of the networks. In this paper, we present a survey on some typical or newly proposed MAC protocols which aims at enhancing energy efficiency of the networks. The classification and beneficial characteristics of MAC protocols are discussed. Furthermore, we analyze the protocols’ performance in various fields, and point out the open research issue.
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paper_title: Design guidelines for wireless sensor networks: communication, clustering and aggregation

paper_content:

Abstract When sensor nodes are organized in clusters, they could use either single hop or multi-hop mode of communication to send their data to their respective cluster heads. We present a systematic cost-based analysis of both the modes, and provide results that could serve as guidelines to decide which mode should be used for given settings. We determine closed form expressions for the required number of cluster heads and the required battery energy of nodes for both the modes. We also propose a hybrid communication mode which is a combination of single hop and multi-hop modes, and which is more cost-effective than either of the two modes. Our problem formulation also allows for the application to be taken into account in the overall design problem through a data aggregation model.
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paper_title: An application-specific protocol architecture for wireless microsensor networks

paper_content:

Networking together hundreds or thousands of cheap microsensor nodes allows users to accurately monitor a remote environment by intelligently combining the data from the individual nodes. These networks require robust wireless communication protocols that are energy efficient and provide low latency. We develop and analyze low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH), a protocol architecture for microsensor networks that combines the ideas of energy-efficient cluster-based routing and media access together with application-specific data aggregation to achieve good performance in terms of system lifetime, latency, and application-perceived quality. LEACH includes a new, distributed cluster formation technique that enables self-organization of large numbers of nodes, algorithms for adapting clusters and rotating cluster head positions to evenly distribute the energy load among all the nodes, and techniques to enable distributed signal processing to save communication resources. Our results show that LEACH can improve system lifetime by an order of magnitude compared with general-purpose multihop approaches.
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paper_title: A Delay-Bounded MAC Protocol for Mission- and Time-Critical Applications in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) designed for mission- and time-critical applications require timely and deterministic data delivery within stringent deadline bounds. Exceeding delay limits for such applications can lead to system malfunction or ultimately dangerous situations that can threaten human safety. In this paper, we propose Slot Stealing Medium Access Control (SS-MAC), an efficient SS-MAC protocol to guarantee predictable and timely channel access for time-critical data in IWSNs. In the proposed SS-MAC, aperiodic time-critical traffic opportunistically steals time slots assigned to periodic non-critical traffic. Additionally, a dynamic deadline-based scheduling is introduced to provide guaranteed channel access in emergency and event-based situations, where multiple sensor nodes are triggered simultaneously to transmit time-critical data to the controller. The proposed protocol is evaluated mathematically to provide the worst-case delay bound for the time-critical traffic. Performance comparisons are carried out between the proposed SS-MAC and WirelessHART standard and they show that, for the time-critical traffic, the proposed SS-MAC can achieve, at least, a reduction of almost 30% in the worst-case delay with a significant channel utilization efficiency.
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paper_title: Comprehensive review for energy efficient hierarchical routing protocols on wireless sensor networks

paper_content:

In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have played a major role in applications such as tracking and monitoring in remote environments. Designing energy efficient protocols for routing of data events is a major challenge due to the dynamic topology and distributed nature of WSNs. Main aim of the paper is to discuss hierarchical routing protocols in order to improve the energy efficiency and network lifetime. This paper provides a discussion about hierarchical energy efficient routing protocols based on classical and swarm intelligence approach. The routing protocols belonging to both categories can be summarized according to energy efficiency, data aggregation, location awareness, QoS, scalability, load balancing, fault tolerance, query based and multipath. A systematic literature review has been conducted for hierarchical energy efficient routing protocols reported from 2012 to 2017. This survey provides a technical direction for researchers on how to develop routing protocols. Finally, research gaps in the reviewed protocols and the potential future aspects have been discussed.Graphical Abstract
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paper_title: Clustering based on the node health status in wireless sensor networks

paper_content:

One of the applications of wireless sensor network is the forest fire monitoring which has different characteristics from others. In this application, the connectivity of nodes should not be destroyed just because of nodes lose their energy or burnt in the fire. Since the wide area of monitoring, the clustering method is considered as the efficient routing to increase its scalability as well as reduce energy consumed of nodes. Many clustering methods which are mostly based on Leach protocol are proposed without considering the node's failure. Here, we proposed the node health status as a parameter to select a Cluster Head and compared its performance with Leach, MTE and the direct algorithm. Results show that the number of packets received and the alive nodes of the proposed method are higher than others. Identically, it has the lowest average end to end delay which is suitable for forest fire application.
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paper_title: TEEN: a routing protocol for enhanced efficiency in wireless sensor networks

paper_content:

Wireless sensor networks are expected to find wide applicability and increasing deployment in the near future. In this paper, we propose a formal classification of sensor networks, based on their mode of functioning, as proactive and reactive networks. Reactive networks, as opposed to passive data collecting proactive networks, respond immediately to changes in the relevant parameters of interest. We also introduce a new energy efficient protocol, TEEN (Threshold sensitive Energy Efficient sensor Network protocol) for reactive networks. We evaluate the performance of our protocol for a simple temperature sensing application. In terms of energy efficiency, our protocol has been observed to outperform existing conventional sensor network protocols.
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paper_title: An application-specific protocol architecture for wireless microsensor networks

paper_content:

Networking together hundreds or thousands of cheap microsensor nodes allows users to accurately monitor a remote environment by intelligently combining the data from the individual nodes. These networks require robust wireless communication protocols that are energy efficient and provide low latency. We develop and analyze low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH), a protocol architecture for microsensor networks that combines the ideas of energy-efficient cluster-based routing and media access together with application-specific data aggregation to achieve good performance in terms of system lifetime, latency, and application-perceived quality. LEACH includes a new, distributed cluster formation technique that enables self-organization of large numbers of nodes, algorithms for adapting clusters and rotating cluster head positions to evenly distribute the energy load among all the nodes, and techniques to enable distributed signal processing to save communication resources. Our results show that LEACH can improve system lifetime by an order of magnitude compared with general-purpose multihop approaches.
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Title: A Survey on Medium Access Control (MAC) for Clustering Wireless Sensor Network

Section 1: INTRODUCTION
Description 1: Write about the background and motivation for studying MAC in the context of Clustering Wireless Sensor Networks, including the advantages, limitations, and why clustering is significant.

Section 2: RELATED WORKS
Description 2: Summarize previous surveys on MAC protocols in WSN, highlighting their classification methods and focus areas, as well as the gaps that this survey aims to address.

Section 3: NETWORK TOPOLOGY OF WSN
Description 3: Discuss the general network topologies in WSNs, particularly focusing on flat and clustering topologies, and explain the impact of these topologies on MAC protocols.

Section 4: SOURCES OF ISSUES OF MAC
Description 4: Identify and explain the sources of issues in MAC protocols, including factors like energy efficiency, latency, throughput, and scalability, as well as elements influencing these metrics such as collision, overhearing, idle listening, and overhead.

Section 5: COMPARING MAC FOR CLUSTERING WSN
Description 5: Provide a detailed comparison of various MAC protocols specifically designed for clustering WSN, including their performance in terms of energy consumption, latency, throughput, and scalability.

Section 6: CONCLUSION
Description 6: Summarize the key findings of the survey, including the advantages and disadvantages of different clustering MAC protocols, and suggest potential areas for future research.