Energy-efficient Wireless MAC Protocols for railway monitoring applications. Energy efficiency is one of the most important design factors for the WSNs. This paper proposes another new protocol, named E-BMA, which achieves even better energy efficiency for low and medium traffic.
Energy-efficient Wireless MAC Protocols for railway monitoring applications. Energy efficiency is one of the most important design factors for the WSNs. This paper proposes another new protocol, named E-BMA, which achieves even better energy efficiency for low and medium traffic.
Energy-efficient Wireless MAC Protocols for railway monitoring applications. Energy efficiency is one of the most important design factors for the WSNs. This paper proposes another new protocol, named E-BMA, which achieves even better energy efficiency for low and medium traffic.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, VOL. 14, NO.
2, JUNE 2013 649
Energy-Efcient Wireless MAC Protocols for Railway Monitoring Applications G. M. Shaullah, Member, IEEE, Salahuddin A. Azad, and A. B. M. Shawkat Ali, Senior Member, IEEE AbstractRecent advances in wireless sensor networking (WSN) techniques have encouraged interest in the development of vehicle health monitoring (VHM) systems. These have the potential for use in the monitoring of railway signaling systems and rail tracks. Energy efciency is one of the most impor- tant design factors for the WSNs as the typical sensor nodes are equipped with limited power batteries. In earlier research, an energy-efcient cluster-based adaptive time-division multiple- access (TDMA) medium-access-control (MAC) protocol, named EA-TDMA, has been developed by the authors for the purpose of communication between the sensors placed in a railway wagon. This paper proposes another new protocol, named E-BMA, which achieves even better energy efciency for low and medium trafc by minimizing the idle time during the contention period. In addi- tion to railway applications, the EA-TDMA and E-BMA protocols are suitable for generic wireless data communication purposes. Both analytical and simulation results for the energy consumption of TDMA, EA-TDMA, BMA, and E-BMA have been presented in this paper to demonstrate the superiority of the EA-TDMA and E-BMA protocols. Index TermsEnergy efciency, medium access control (MAC) protocol, railway wagon, vehicle health monitoring (VHM), wire- less sensor network (WSN). I. INTRODUCTION W ITH the increased demand for railway services, railway monitoring systems continue to advance at a remarkable pace to maintain reliable, safe, and secure operation. The lack of safety and security monitoring of railway infrastructure runs the risk of train collision, train derailment, terrorist threats, failures in the train wagons, etc. The performance of rail vehicles run- ning on tracks is limited by the lateral instability inherent to the design of the wagons steering and the response of the railway wagon to individual or combined track irregularities. Railway track irregularities need to be kept within safe operating mar- gins by undertaking appropriate maintenance programs. Track geometry inspection and monitoring enhances train-operating safety and reduced vehicle and track dynamic interaction. Mon- Manuscript received March 15, 2012; revised August 15, 2012 and October 15, 2012; accepted October 20, 2012. Date of publication November 30, 2012; date of current version May 29, 2013. This work was supported in part by Prof. P. Wolfs and in part by Prof. C. Cole, both from the Center for Railway Engineering, Central Queensland University. The Associate Editor for this paper was B. Ning. G. M. Shaullah and S. A. Azad are with the Power Engineering Research Group, School of Engineering and Built Environment, Central Queensland Uni- versity, Rockhampton, Qld. 4702, Australia (e-mail: g.shaullah@cqu.edu.au; s.azad@cqu.edu.au). A. B. M. S. Ali is with the School of Information and Communication Tech- nology, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, Qld. 4702, Australia (e-mail: s.ali@cqu.edu.au). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TITS.2012.2227315 Fig. 1. Typical scenario for railway-wagon health monitoring system. itoring vehicle characteristics in real time from track measure- ment data has been addressed by various research organizations [2][7]. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used to monitor railway tracks and irregularities, detect abandoned objects in railway stations, develop intrusion detection systems, secure railway operations, and monitor tunnels [8][10]. Seifert envisioned [8] that a network of smart sensors could be utilized to monitor public spaces for potential invasion to alert the operators at a control center about the event. In addition, a WSN can be deployed to monitor large areas with greater efcacy in video-based intrusion detection systems. Aboelela et al. [9] proposed a new approach to reduce the accident rate and increase the efciency of railroad maintenance activities. The protocol adopts a multilayered multipath routing architecture in which each sensor transmits the sensed data to the two nearest cluster heads (CHs). Each CH aggregates the data using a fuzzy logic technique and transfers it to the sink node. Cheekiralla [10] designed a wireless sensor unit for the surveillance of a train tunnel, which measures the vertical displacements along the critical zone of the tunnel during adjacent construction activity. The potential of WSN technology to monitor the railway- wagon health condition and the vertical displacement of railway wagons due to track irregularities has yet to be fully explored. The limited lifetime of the batteries that power the sensor nodes makes the energy efciency a major design issue for WSNs [11]. This paper concentrates on developing an energy-efcient WSN MAC protocol to collect data from sensor nodes that are placed inside the railway wagons and send the data to the locomotive for further precautionary actions to prevent any future disastrous events. A prototype of the proposed railway- wagon health monitoring systemis given in Fig. 1. Although the proposed energy-efcient protocol is designed with the railway applications in mind, it is applicable to generic wireless data communication purposes. Analytical and simulation models have been developed for the existing and proposed protocols to compare their performances in terms of energy consumption. 1524-9050/$31.00 2012 IEEE 650 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, VOL. 14, NO. 2, JUNE 2013 II. BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY Central Queensland University, in collaboration with the Center for Railway Engineering [4], has been working on an autonomous health card device for online analysis of car body motion to perceive track condition and monitor derailment. The health card devices use an accelerometer and angular rate sensors with a coordinate transform to analyze the car body motions into six degrees of freedom [12], [13]. These health card devices inspect every wagon in the eet using low-cost smart devices [4], [12]. An algorithm was developed, which analyzes signals coming from accelerometers mounted on the wagon body to measure the dynamic interaction between the track and the rail vehicle. The algorithm was validated using collected eld data, e.g., accelerations measured at strategic points on the wagon body and the bogies. Each prototype health card incorporates a 27-MHz mi- crocontroller with 256 kB of onboard RAM, four dual-axis accelerometers, a Global Positioning Satellite receiver, two low-power radios, lithium-ion batteries, and a solar panel. A Rabbit 3000 processor is used, which requires 200 mW of power at 40 MHz. The rst generation of the health card con- sumes a total of 400 mWor energy requirement of 9.6 Wh daily. An 80-Wh lithium battery is built into the health card that can provide energy for up to eight days. Data were collected from a ballast wagon in which dual-axis accelerometers were tted to each corner of the body and each side frame. A personal- computer-based data acquisition system was used to store data. The main purpose of the data acquisition was to provide real data that are represented to the health card device. Data have been used to validate and demonstrate the effectiveness of signal analysis techniques and, nally, to develop a model to monitor typical dynamic behavior and track irregularities [12], [13]. Both the vertical and lateral conditions of the railway wagon have been measured by each accelerometer. The aim of the sensing arrangement was to capture roll, pitch, yaw, vertical, and lateral accelerations of the wagon body. The ADXL202/ADXL210 [14] dual-axis low-power low-cost ac- celeration sensor measured 16 channel acceleration data in g units, with eight channels for the wagon body and eight for the wagon side frame. Four sensor nodes were placed in each wagon body, and the locations of the sensors were front-left body, front-right body, rear-left body, and rear-right body. Sim- ilarly, four sensor nodes were placed in each wagons side fame [4]. Sensor locations and naming convention are illustrated in Fig. 2. The sampling rate of the accelerometer can be set from 0.01 Hz to 5 KHz through adjustable capacitors, and the clock speed of this health card device was set to 100 Hz. Data were continuously collected from a ballast wagon, which was a conventional three-piece bogie spaced l b = 10.97 m apart. The accelerometers were spaced l = 14.4 m apart. The test run was a normal ballast lying operation, starting with a full load of ballast, traveling to the maintenance site, dropping the ballast on the track, and returning empty via the same route. This research work is an extension of the existing health card system development endeavor, aiming at improving the energy efciency of the railway-wagon health monitoring system. In the proposed system, there are ve sensor nodes placed inside Fig. 2. Accelerometer locations and axis naming convention [4]. each wagon, instead of four in the existing system. One sensor node is used as a CH that collects data from other nodes and sends data to the central control room or base station (BS). In this system, an accelerometer has been placed in each corner of the wagon and one accelerometer at the center of the wagon, which acts as a CH. The BS is placed in the middle of the train for optimal signal transmission range. If there are W wagons in the train, then the BS is positioned between wagons W/2 and W/2 + 1. This feature not only reduces the overall energy consumption of the network signicantly but reduces energy dissipation of each CH as well, as they need to transmit data over a shorter range. Each node forwards packets to the CHin each wagon, and the CH works as a router to send the data to the BS in the middle of the train. The locomotive driver can monitor the sensor data through an audio/visual system and take decisions accordingly. Each node is powered by an internal battery to make this work independently. The cluster-based WSN deployed in the railway-wagon health monitoring system, as illustrated, must be designed to be very energy efcient and reliable. In a sensor node, power is required for data sensing, communication, and data processing. Energy efciency is a major issue in designing WSN to prolong the network lifetime as the sensor nodes have limited battery lifetime. The main sources of energy loss are idle listening, col- lision, overhearing, overemitting, and control packet overhead [11], [15]. The wireless modules of the health card were developed using Bluetooth IEEE 802.15.1 standard [16], which is an outdated standard. Bluetooth devices are inefcient in terms of energy dissipation. The data communication range of Bluetooth is only 10 m, which requires more of sensors per wagon for data communication with the locomotive. The absence of energy-efcient features for data collection and communica- tion between wagons to the locomotive makes this system less reliable. Instead of Bluetooth technology, this study con- siders the IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee standard [17], which is an ultralow-power and low-data-rate radio standard. Due to its simplicity and low cost, ZigBee is the most suitable standard to date for railway applications, e.g., data communication be- tween sensor nodes placed inside the wagons. The CC2431 SHAFIULLAH et al.: WIRELESS MAC PROTOCOLS FOR RAILWAY MONITORING APPLICATIONS 651 Fig. 3. Operation diagram of TDMA [22]. System-on-Chip [18] uses an energy-efcient ZigBee-enabled CC2420 RF transceiver [19] with an enhanced 8051 micro- controller, up to 128-KB Flash memory, 8 KB of RAM, and many other powerful features, such as lowcurrent consumption, that makes the technology an attractive solution for WSNs. The ZigBee-compliant radio operates on 16 channels in the 2.4-GHz ISM band, and standard data rates are 250 kb/s. This data transfer capability is suitable for the sensor networks placed in the railway wagon. In general, the maximum length of the railway wagon is 17 m. However, considering redundancy, it is wise to be considering a radio receiver with a 34-m range that covers two wagons. Hence, the transmission range of the receiver is expected to be sufcient for the railway wagon as it covers 35 m of wireless range. IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee standard has four states: sleep or shutdown, idle or listening, transmit, and receiving. It was shown in an experiment by Bougard et al. [20] that the Zigbee standard consumes less than 50% of the energy for actual data transmission, and the rest of the energy is consumed for other activities. A signicant percentage (25%) of the energy is consumed during the contention procedure. This is due to the multiplicative effect of carrier-sense multiple access/collision detection (CSMA/CD). The waiting for an acknowledgement consumes 15% of the energy. Moreover, 20% of the en- ergy is used for listening for the beacon by the transceiver. Based on the energy breakdown, several ways to improve the overall energy efciency were proposed by the researchers. Bougard et al. [20] proposed an energy-aware radio activation policy to optimize the PHY and MAC layers parameters in a dense sensor network scenario. Experimental results showed that PHY level improvements combined with MAC optimiza- tions allow energy-efcient self-powered sensor networks [20]. The traditional wireless MAC and routing protocols do not fulll the requirements of WSN applications since WSN protocols need to focus on energy-efcient design to ensure minimum power consumption and maximum battery lifetime [21], [22]. Energy-efcient MAC and routing protocol design is currently a prime research area in wireless data communication application. This paper concentrates on developing an energy-efcient WSN MAC protocol to collect data from sensor nodes that are placed inside the railway wagons and send it to the locomotive for further precautionary actions. The authors have already de- veloped an analytical model of an energy-efcient WSN MAC protocol EA-TDMA [1], which is the most suitable for medium to high trafc. This paper proposes another energy-efcient WSN MAC protocol, named E-BMA, which achieves even better energy efciency. Popular MAC protocols are discussed in the following section with their strengths and weaknesses. III. SCHEDULE-BASED MEDIUM-ACCESS CONTROL PROTOCOL The major requirements of a wireless MAC protocol are: energy efciency, scalability, latency, fairness, and bandwidth utilization. Contention-based protocols are scalable and adapt- able to node density or trafc load variations. However, these schemes have a major limitation relating to an enormous amount of energy wasted due to collisions, overhearing, and idle listening [11], [21]. Schedule-based protocols are collision free and, hence, trim down the wastage of energy due to colli- sion. However, they lack the exibility and scalability inherent in the contention-based protocols. Time-division multiple access (TDMA) is a schedule-based MAC protocol where the transmission channel is divided into several time slots, and each node is assigned a time slot. Each node wakes up and transmits data only in its allocated time slot and remains in sleep mode in the remaining time slots [11], [21]. However, this protocol only uses the node energy ef- ciently when the trafc load is high. Nodes with empty buffers keep their radio turned on during their scheduled slot and, hence, dissipate some of their remaining energy. The energy- efcient TDMA (E-TDMA) reduces energy consumption due to idle listening. Sensor nodes keep their radios off when there is no data to transmit. However, the CH has to keep the radio on all the time and hence waste energy [11], [21], [22]. Fig. 3 illustrates a single round for TDMA protocol. Low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) [23], an architecture for wireless microsensor networks, incorporates the features of cluster-based routing and MAC protocol. This protocol achieves energy efciency and low latency while maintaining application-specic quality. LEACH allows all data from nodes within the cluster to be locally processed in the CH that reduces the data set. Data aggregation was done to combine several correlated data signals into a smaller set of information, and then, the resultant data were sent to the BS using a xed spreading code and a CSMA approach [23], [24]. The bit-map-assisted (BMA) protocol [25] is another schedule-based protocol that aims at reducing energy wastage 652 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, VOL. 14, NO. 2, JUNE 2013 Fig. 4. Operation diagram of the BMA protocol [25]. Fig. 5. Operation and timing diagram of the EA-TDMA protocol [1]. due to collision and idle listening. This protocol deals only with event-driven networks where sensor nodes forward data to the CH only if a signicant event has been detected. The cluster setup phase is similar to the LEACH [23] protocol. In the contention period, each node in the cluster transmits a 1-bit control message to the CH node during its allocated slot if it has data to transmit; otherwise, the transmitter radio remains idle. At the end of the contention period, the CH in the BMA protocol makes a transmission schedule and transmits the schedule only to the source nodes [25], [26]. In TDMA, once a node is allocated a data slot, that allocation persists for all frames in that round regardless of whether the node has enough data packets to send in each frame. Conversely, in BMA, the allocation is done in the contention phase before the starting of each frame, as shown in Fig. 4. Therefore, BMA is more energy efcient than TDMA and E-TDMA for the cases of low trafc load, relatively few sensor nodes per cluster, and relatively large packet size [25], [26]. In railway applications, the accelerometer data are contin- uously collected while the train is in operation from sensor nodes, and hence, this application is classied as a medium to high trafc load as the sensor collects data at the rate of 25 kb/s. Considering the application requirements, authors developed an energy-efcient protocol, named EA-TDMA [1], which reduces the energy consumption during data transmission. In this protocol, every node wakes up in its allocated slot and transmits data to the CH. If there are no data to send, it turns off the radio immediately. The nodes move into sleep mode instead of idle mode in the absence of data. An operation diagram and a timing diagram of the EA-TDMA protocol are illustrated in SHAFIULLAH et al.: WIRELESS MAC PROTOCOLS FOR RAILWAY MONITORING APPLICATIONS 653 Fig. 6. Operation of the E-BMA protocol. Fig. 5(a) and (b), respectively. A detailed description of the EA-TDMA protocol is available in [1]. The energy consump- tion of EA-TDMA is signicantly less than TDMA at low trafc loads, although this gap diminishes at high trafc loads. This protocol also outperforms BMA protocol in all trafc conditions except very low trafc [1]. In this paper, in addition to the analytical results, the superiority of the EA-TDMA protocol has been demonstrated by the simulation model. The railway-wagon health monitoring system requires the MAC protocol to be capable of handling steady trafc and energy efcient. Although some of the aforementioned proto- cols were customized to achieve energy efciency, this paper further explores the achievement of better energy efciency. In addition to the EA-TDMA protocol in this paper, the authors propose a new energy-efcient WSN MAC protocol, named E-BMA. This paper explores both the analytical and simulation model of EA-TDMA and E-BMA protocols to demonstrate the superiority of these protocols compared with other conventional protocols. The proposed protocol achieves better energy ef- ciency for low to medium trafc load, and it is comparable with the EA-TDMA and TDMA protocols for high trafc load. The newly proposed energy-efcient E-BMA protocol is described in the next section. IV. ENERGY-EFFICIENT E-BMA PROTOCOL The BMA protocol consumes less energy than TDMA at low and medium trafc loads, whereas in the energy-efcient ver- sion, EA-TDMA consumes less energy than BMA, unless the trafc load is very low. The contention phase in BMA helps to minimize the idle listening period during the data transmission phase; however, the contention phase itself consumes a certain amount of energy before each frame transmission. The energy consumption in the contention phase is paid off at light trafc loads. However, at high trafc loads, this contention phase turns into an overhead as the probability of data transmission becomes almost certain. In the proposed E-BMA protocol, the source nodes use piggybacking to make the reservation of the corresponding data slot rather than sending a control message during its allocated contention slot, as shown in Fig. 6. Unlike BMA, in the new protocol, a source node does not make the reservation in the contention slot as soon as the data packet becomes available. Instead, it waits for one additional frame duration to see if there is a successive data packet to send. There is a 1-bit eld allocated in each data packet header to indicate whether the source node has a successive data packet to send. If a source node has successive data packets to send in a number of consecutive frames, the reservation is made once for the initial data packet in its allocated contention slot, and the successive conrmations will be made through piggybacking. Note that piggybacking a control message requires only 1-bit extra space in the data packet, and hence, the additional power required for piggybacking a control message on a data packet is negligible. In E-BMA, the transceiver of the source node is turned off during the contention phase when it has no control message to send, whereas in BMA, the transmitter is kept idle in similar situations. This allows the E-BMA protocol to save energy both at low and medium trafc. E-MBA is only outperformed by TDMA and EA-TDMA when the trafc load is extremely high. To achieve energy efciency, the E-BMA protocol compromises the latency of data transmission. Each data packet has to wait for one additional frame duration before being transmitted to the CH. As there will be few sensor nodes per cluster in the railway-wagon health monitoring system, the frame length will be much shorter, and the latency of E-BMA will be within the acceptable limit. Operation of the E-MBA protocol is divided into rounds, and each round is comprised of a setup phase and a steady- state phase. The steady-state phase is comprised of a contention phase and a data transmission phase. Both cluster formation and CH selection occur in the setup phase. All non-CH nodes reserve the data slots in the contention phase, whereas data transmission from source nodes to the CH occurs during the data transmission phase. Setup Phase: Considering the specic application area and its simplicity, it is assumed that the network consists of multiple xed clusters. In each of the clusters, there is one CH located in the center of the cluster. Based on the application and cluster size, direct transmission for data communication between source nodes and the CH is considered instead of multihop data transmission. In the setup phase, the CH informs all nodes about the start of the current round, frame start/stop time, and number of frames in a round. Contention Phase: Each node is assigned a specic slot in the contention phase. A node transmits a 1-bit control 654 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, VOL. 14, NO. 2, JUNE 2013 message during its scheduled slot to reserve a data slot if it has a data packet to transmit; otherwise, the node remains in sleep mode during that contention slot. After the contention period is completed, the CH sets up and broadcasts a transmission schedule for the source nodes. However, unlike BMA, the source node does not make the reservation immediately after the data becomes available. Instead, the source node keeps the data packet in the buffer, and it waits for one frame duration to see if there is a consecutive data packet to send. Data Transmission Phase: The data transmission phase con- tains one or more frames. The size and duration of each frame is xed. Nodes send their data to the CH at most once per frame during their allocated time slot. During the data transmission phase, each source node turns on its radio in its allocated data slot and transmits data to the CH. If there are consecutive packets, the transmitted data packet conveys that information through piggybacking. After receiving all data from the nodes of a round, data ag- gregation takes place to reduce unwanted data. A considerable amount of energy is saved if the data are locally aggregated in the CH rst rather than when sending the raw data to the BS or central controller and aggregating them in the BS. Then, the resultant data are sent from the CH to the BS using a spreading code and a CSMA approach, as used in the LEACH protocol [20]. Once the CH is ready to send the aggregated data, it must sense the channel to see if anyone else is transmitting using the BS spreading code. The CH waits if the channel is busy; otherwise, the CH transmits data to the BS. After a predened time, the system begins the next round, and the whole process is repeated. Analytical and simulation models were developed based on the energy model [21], [22] for the TDMA, EA-TDMA, BMA, and E-BMA to compare their performances in terms of trafc load and energy dissipation features, which is presented in the next section. V. ANALYTICAL AND SIMULATION MODELING To analyze the performance of the proposed E-BMAprotocol and compare its performance with existing wireless MAC pro- tocols, including EA-TDMA, analytical and simulation models have developed. This proposed protocol is analyzed in a WSN scenario where there are one CH and N non-CH nodes in each cluster, assum- ing that there are l frames in a round. The data slot duration is assumed to be T d . Let the probability of a node having data to transmit be p. The power consumption in the transmit mode and the receive mode are P t and P r , respectively. Energy dissipation of idle listening mode is Pi. For simplicity, as stated in [21] and [23], the energy required to turn on the radio by the source nodes for transmission or reception is negligible and, hence, is ignored in the following analysis. As per denition, T d is the time required to transmit or receive a data packet, and it is assumed that T c is the time required to transmit/receive a control packet. The time required for the CH to transmit a control message to all non-CH nodes in BMA is T ch . The time required for a node to switch on, TABLE I NOMENCLATURE check its buffer, and turn off its radio is in E-TDMA is T e . The parameters used in the analysis are dened in Table I. A. Energy Consumption The energy consumption of the TDMA, EA-TDMA, BMA, and E-BMA protocols based on the energy model in [20] and [22] is modeled as follows. Energy Consumption of TDMA Protocol: During the con- tention, the CH and all non-CH nodes keep their radios on, and communication takes place between the CH and all non-CH nodes. In this period, the CH assigns data slots to individual nodes for data transmission and informs all nodes in the cluster. Therefore, energy consumption by the CH to send a control message is P t T c , and energy consumption by each node to receive a control message is P r T c . Therefore, the energy consumption in a contention period is given by E cont = NP r T c + P t T c . (1) Each node transmits, at most, one packet per frame inter- val. During a frame transmission, energy consumption by a source node is P t T d . The energy consumed by the CH while receiving the data packet is P r T d . A nonsource node turns on its radio and keeps it idle during its scheduled time slots. The energy consumed by a nonsource node is P i T d . As the CH also stays in idle mode when there are no data to receive from the non-CH node during a data slot, the energy consumed by the CH is also P i T d . In a data slot, a node sends data with probability p and remains idle with probability (1 p). The expected energy consumption during a single frame transmission consisting of N data slots is [pP t T d + (1 p)P i T d + pP r T d + (1 p)PiTd]N. The expected energy consumption in a trans- mission round is given by E trans =[pP t T d +(1p)P e T e +pP r T d +(1p)P i T d ] lN. (2) As each round is comprised of l frames, the average energy consumption per round in the TDMA protocol can be SHAFIULLAH et al.: WIRELESS MAC PROTOCOLS FOR RAILWAY MONITORING APPLICATIONS 655 formulated as E TDMA =[NP r T c + P t T c ] + [pP t T d + 2(1 p)P i T d + pP r T d ] lN. (3) Energy Consumption of EA-TDMA Protocol: Similar to the TDMA protocol, the energy consumption in a contention period is given by E cont = NP r T c + P t T c . (4) EA-TDMA differs from TDMA in that every non-CH node in EA-TDMA wakes up in its allocated slot and checks transmit buffers. If there are no data to send, it turns off the radio immediately. Hence, the energy consumed by a non- CH node that has no data to transmit is P e T e . The energy P e T e is used to switch on, check the transmit buffers, and then turn off the radio module. The expected energy consumption in a transmission round is given by E trans = [[pP t T d + (1 p)P e T e ] + [pP r T d + (1 p)P i T d ]] lN. (5) As each round is comprised of l frames, the average energy consumption per round in the EA-TDMA protocol can be formulated as E EATDMA = [NP r T c + P t T c ] + [[pP t T d + (1 p)P e T e ] + [pP r T d + (1 p)P i T d ]] lN. (6) Energy Consumption of BMA Protocol: In BMA, there is a contention period in each session when all nodes keep their radios on. Each source node transmits a control message during its scheduled slot, as well as its remains idle (N 1) slots. Each nonsource node stays idle during the contention period. During a contention slot, the CH node receives control packets when there is a source node sending a control packet; otherwise, the CH stays idle. The expected energy consumption during a contention period is given by E cont =[pP t T c +(1 p)P i T c +(N 1)P i T c +P r T ch ] N + [pP r T c + (1 p)P i T c ] N + P t T ch . (7) During a frame transmission, each source node sends the data packet in its allocated slot, whereas the nonsource nodes keep their radios turned off. The expected energy consumption during a frame transmission is given by E frame = [pP t T d + pP r T d ]N. (8) The average energy consumption per round in the BMA protocol can be formulated as E BMA = [[pP t T c + pP r T c + 2(1 p)P i T c + (N 1)P i T c +P r T ch + pP t T d + pP r T d ] N + P t T ch ] l. (9) Energy Consumption of E-BMA Protocol: A source node sends a control message in its respective contention slot (unless the reservation is done by the preceding data packet sent by the same source node in the previous frame) and remains idle in the remaining (N 1) contention slots. The nonsource nodes keep their radio turned off during the entire contention period. A control message cannot be piggybacked if there is no data packet sent in the previous frame by the same node. The probability of a data packet not being piggybacked is p(1 p). If a control message is piggybacked, the source node keeps the radio turned off in the respective contention slot, whereas the CH node remains in idle listening mode. The expected energy consumption during a contention period is given by E cont =[p(1 p)P t T c + P r T ch ] N + [p(1 p)P r T c + (1 p(1 p)) P i T c ] N + P t T ch . (10) During a frame transmission, each source node sends the data packet in its allocated slot, whereas the nonsource nodes keep their radios turned off. Note that piggybacking a control message only requires 1-bit extra space in the data packet. Hence, it is assumed that no additional power is required for piggybacking. The expected energy consump- tion during a frame transmission is given by E frame = [pP t T d + pP r T d ]N. (11) The average energy consumption per round in the E-BMA protocol can be formulated as E EBMA = [[p(1 p)P t T c + p(1 p)P r T c + (1 p(1 p)) P i T c + P r T ch + pP t T d +pP r T d ] N + P t T ch ] l. (12) B. Transmission Latency The maximum transmission latency of TDMA and EA- TDMA protocols is given by T c + NT d as both protocols have similar frame structure. The maximum transmission latency of BMA is T ch + (T c + T d )N. The maximum transmission la- tency of E-BMA is 2[T ch + 2(T c + T d )N] as each data packet has to wait for one additional frame duration before being transmitted. Simulation models have been developed for the TDMA, EA- TDMA, BMA, and E-BMA protocols to verify the correctness of the analytical models using Java programming language and SimJava Package version 2.0 [27]. SimJava is a process- oriented discrete-event simulation package developed by the University of Edinburgh. The simulation results represent the general characteristics of the existing and proposed protocols. The simulation for each model was run for 10 000 rounds. The expected energy consumption was calculated, averaging energy consumption over the entire simulation period. Both analytical and simulation results conrm that E-BMA is more energy efcient than the other three protocols at low to medium trafc. It is only outperformed by the TDMA and EA-TDMA protocols when the trafc is extremely high. In the following section, detailed analyses of the results are presented, and protocol performances in terms of energy dissipation are compared. 656 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, VOL. 14, NO. 2, JUNE 2013 Fig. 7. Energy dissipation of EA-TDMA, BMA, and TDMA protocols as a function of probability p (N = 10 and l = 2). VI. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS This section analyzes the performance of the proposed E-BMA protocol in terms of energy efciency and transmission latency. In addition, the performance of the E-BMA protocol has been compared with that of the TDMA, EA-TDMA, and BMA protocols in terms of energy dissipation and transmis- sion latency. As aforementioned, the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and ZigBee wireless module are used for the proposed MAC protocol. The ZigBee-enabled 2.4-GHz CC2420 RF transceiver [19] is used for this analytical and simulation analysis. For analytical and simulation modeling purposes, it is assumed that the power consumption is 50 mW for transmitting, 54 mW for receiving, and 50 mW for idle listening. These power ratings are comparable with that of the CC2420 RF transceiver specication. The data rate is 25 kb/s, and the control packet size is 5 bytes. For simplicity, it is assumed that T e = T d /10 and that P e = P i . A. Energy Consumption Energy consumption of the protocols has been evaluated and compared for different parameter settings. For analytical and simulation analysis, four cases have considered the estimation of the energy dissipation of the protocols being analyzed. Case 1: In this case, the average energy consumption of the aforementioned four WSN MAC protocols has been de- rived for various transmission probabilities. It is assumed that the total number of non-CH nodes is N = 10, the number of frames is l = 2 per round, and the data packet size is 100 bytes. Fig. 7(a) and (b) shows the average energy consump- tion of the TDMA, EA-TDMA, BMA, and E-BMA proto- cols for the transmission probability varying from p=0.1 to 1.0. The graphs reveal that the energy consumption of the TDMA protocol is almost constant as the difference be- tween transmission power and idle listening power is very small. The EA-TDMA protocol consumes less energy for low to medium trafc, i.e., from p=0.1 to 0.5, whereas it is as good as the TDMA protocol for medium to high trafc, 1 1 Lowdata trafc refers to transmission probability, i.e., p<0.3, whereas high data trafc refers to transmission probability, i.e., p>0.7. Medium trafc refers to the transmission probability in between. i.e., from p = 0.5 to 1.0. This is because, in EA-TDMA, if a node has no data to send in its allocated slot, the transceiver is turned off to save energy. The lower the trafc, the higher the savings. The BMA protocol is com- parable with the EA-TDMA protocol for low trafc, i.e., p = 0.1; however, it consumes more energy than TDMA and EA-TDMA for medium to high trafc because the contention phase in BMA consumes a certain amount of energy, depending on the trafc load. At high traf- c loads, the contention phase turns into an overhead for BMA. The proposed E-BMA protocol outperforms all three protocols signicantly. The E-BMA is only outperformed by TDMA and EA-TDMA when p 0.8, i.e., when the trafc load is high. In E-BMA, the transceiver of the source node is turned off during a contention slot when it has no control message to send, whereas in BMA, the transceiver is kept idle in similar situations. This allows the E-BMA protocol to save energy both at low and medium trafc. However, at high trafc loads, the overhead of the con- tention phase surpasses the savings and that why E-MBA is only outperformed by TDMA and EA-TDMA when the trafc load is extremely high. It is to be noted that there is a constant difference between the energy consumption of BMA and that of E-BMA. Case 2: In this experiment, the average energy consumption of the aforementioned four WSNMACprotocols has been de- rived for a different number of non-CHnodes. It is assumed that the transmission probability is p = 0.4, the number of frames is l = 2, and data packet size is 100 bytes. Fig. 8(a) and (b) shows the average energy consump- tion of TDMA, EA-TDMA, BMA, and E-BMA protocols for the total number of non-CH nodes varying from N = 5 to 50. As the trafc load is medium (p = 0.4) in this situation, the performance of E-BMA is the best, which is followed by EA-TDMA and TDMA. The BMA protocol has the maximum energy consumption at medium trafc load. The energy consumption of the BMA protocol dra- matically rises as N increases, signifying the overhead due to contention. The proposed E-BMA protocol minimizes this overhead through piggybacking at medium trafc load. There is a moderate increase in the energy consumption in TDMA and E-TDMA as the number of nodes increases SHAFIULLAH et al.: WIRELESS MAC PROTOCOLS FOR RAILWAY MONITORING APPLICATIONS 657 Fig. 8. Energy dissipation of EA-TDMA, BMA, and TDMA protocols as a function of number of nodes in a cluster: N (p = 0.4, l = 10). Fig. 9. Energy dissipation of EA-TDMA, BMA, and TDMA protocols as a function of number of frames: l (N = 20, p = 0.3). since the overhead in the contention period is minimal for these two protocols. Case 3: In this case, the aforementioned four WSN MAC protocols have been evaluated in terms of average energy consumption for various numbers of frames per round. It is assumed that the total number of non-CH nodes is N = 10, the transmission probability is p = 0.3, and the data packet size is 100 bytes. Fig. 9(a) and (b) shows the average energy consump- tion of TDMA, EA-TDMA, BMA, and E-BMA proto- cols for the number of frames per round changing from l = 2 to 20. As the graphs reveal, for medium trafc and small number of nodes, E-BMA performs the best among these four WSN MAC protocols. In this case, the energy consumption of TDMA is the highest, whereas the energy consumption of EA-TDMA and BMA is in between. Since the number of nodes is small, the contention overhead in BMA moderately increases, and hence, its energy con- sumption is slightly lower than EA-TDMA. The proposed E-BMA protocol has the least contention overhead due to piggybacking. Case 4: In this experiment, the impact of data packet size on the overall energy dissipation has been measured. It is assumed that the total number of nodes is N = 10, the transmission probability is p = 0.4, and the number of frames is l = 2 per round. In Fig. 10(a) and (b), it is evident that the E-BMA protocol is the most energy-conservative protocol among the four protocols, whereas TDMA is the most energy- consuming protocol. However, when the data packet size is less than 50 bytes, the energy dissipation of EA-TDMA is similar to that of E-BMA. This is because the overhead of the wakeup period in the EA-TDMA protocol diminishes with the reduction in packet size. Although the energy consumption of BMA is lower than that of TDMA and EA-TDMA, it is as worse as TDMA for packet sizes less than 50 bytes. The reason is the energy wastage due to idle listening in the data transmission period of TDMA exceeds the contention overhead of BMA when the packet size is small. B. Transmission Latency The maximum transmission latency of the TDMA, EA- TDMA, BMA, and E-BMA is presented for different numbers of nodes and packet sizes. Fig. 11(a) demonstrates that the maximum transmission la- tency in all four protocols increases with the number of nodes, as the length of a frame is directly related to the number of nodes. The packet transmission latency of TDMA and EA- TDMA is the lowest among all four protocols. Due to the exis- tence of the contention period in each frame, the transmission 658 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, VOL. 14, NO. 2, JUNE 2013 Fig. 10. Energy dissipation of EA-TDMA, BMA, and TDMA protocols as a function of data packet size (N = 20, l = 10, p = 0.4). Fig. 11. Transmission latency of EA-TDMA, BMA, and TDMA protocols for (a) different number of nodes and (b) different data packet sizes. latency of BMA is slightly higher. The transmission latency of E-BMA is twice that of BMA as each packet has to wait for one additional frame duration in E-BMA. Fig. 11(b) demon- strates that the maximum transmission latency in all protocols increases with the data packet size, as the length of a frame is directly related to the data packet size. Similar to the previous case, the packet transmission latency of TDMA and EA-TDMA is the lowest. The transmission latency of BMA is slightly higher, and the transmission latency of E-BMA is twice that of BMA. Summarizing the analytical and simulation results, the fol- lowing can be concluded. The E-BMAprotocol is the most energy-efcient protocol, particularly in the case of low and medium trafc applica- tions. However, at extremely high trafc conditions, the EA-TDMA protocol performs better. The E-BMA protocol is more energy efcient than the other three protocols for any number of sensor nodes in a cluster when the trafc load is medium. The E-BMA protocol dissipates less energy than the other three protocols, regardless of the number of frames per round for medium trafc. The performance of the E-BMA protocol is superior to the other three protocols when data packet size is equal to or greater than 50 bytes. For small data packet size (less than 50 bytes), the energy dissipation of EA-TDMA is comparable with E-BMA. Although the transmission latency of E-BMA is higher than other protocols, it will not impact the system performance signicantly when the number of nodes is small. VII. CONCLUSION The performance of rail vehicles running on railway tracks is governed by the dynamic behaviors of railway wagons, partic- ularly in the cases of lateral instability and track irregularities. In this paper, considering the trafc conditions of the intended application, an energy-efcient WSN MAC protocol has been investigated to monitor typical dynamic behavior of railway wagons. Simulation and mathematical models have been devel- oped for the proposed E-BMA protocol, and its performance has been compared with the EA-TDMA, TDMA, and BMA protocols in terms of energy efciency. Analytical and simulation results show that the E-BMA and EA-TDMA protocols outperform both the TDMA and BMA protocols for all trafc conditions. The results revealed that the E-BMA protocol outperformed other protocols for low to medium trafc, whereas the EA-TDMA protocol outperformed the TDMA and BMA protocols for medium to high trafc. The E-BMA protocol is only outperformed by EA-TDMA and TDMA protocols for high trafc. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable and informative suggestions that improved the quality of this paper. SHAFIULLAH et al.: WIRELESS MAC PROTOCOLS FOR RAILWAY MONITORING APPLICATIONS 659 REFERENCES [1] G. M. Shaullah, A. Thompson, P. Wolfs, and S. Ali, Energy-efcient TDMAMACprotocol for wireless sensor networks applications, in Proc. 5th ICECE, Dhaka, Bangladesh, Dec. 2427, 2008, pp. 8590. [2] J. Smith, S. Russel, and M. Looi, Security as a safety issue in rail communications, in Proc. 8th Aust. Workshop SCS, Canberra, Australia, 2003, pp. 7988. [3] V. K. Garg and R. V. Dukkipati, Dynamics of Railway Vehicle Systems. New York: Academic, 1984. [4] S. S. Bleakley, Time frequency analysis of railway wagon body acceler- ations for a low-power autonomous device, M.S. thesis, Fac. Eng. Phys. Syst., Central Queensland Univ., Rockhampton, Australia, Oct. 2006. 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Lazarou, A bit-map-assisted energy-efcient MAC scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks, in Proc. 3rd Int. Symp. IPSN, Berkeley, CA, Apr. 2004, pp. 5560. [27] Simjava Ver. 2.0, . G. M. Shaullah (M12) received the B.Sc. Eng. degree in electrical and electronics engineer- ing from Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology, Chittagong, Bangladesh, and the M. Eng. degree from Central Queensland University (CQUniversity), Rockhampton, Australia. He is cur- rently working toward the Ph.D. degree with the School of Engineering and Built Environment, CQUniversity. He is the author of 25 referred book chapters, journal papers, and conference papers. His research interests include networking and data communication, sensor networking, power engineering, renewable energy, smart grid technology, and computer- aided technology. Salahuddin A. Azad received the B.Sc. Eng. de- gree in computer science and engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Tech- nology, Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1999 and the Ph.D. degree in information and technology from Monash University, Clayton, Australia, in 2007. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fel- low with the Power Engineering Group, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, Australia. He is the author of 17 refereed conference papers, IEEE journal papers, and book chapters. His major re- search interests include renewable energy, smart grid, image processing, ma- chine learning, data mining, and network security. A. B. M. Shawkat Ali (SM10) received the Ph.D. degree in information technology from Monash Uni- versity, Clayton, Australia. He is currently with the School of Information and Communication Technology, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, Australia. In particular, he is currently leading a research group on com- putational intelligence. He is the author of more than 100 research papers in international journals and conferences, as well as several book chapters and books. His research interests include computa- tional intelligence, data mining, smart grids, cloud computing, and biomedical engineering. Dr. Ali is currently the Editor-in-Chief for the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Sciences and Engineering.