DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING

SUBJECT: IOT & WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS (18EC741)

MODULE: 5
COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS

1. Physical layer and transceiver design considerations in WSNs:

So far, we have discussed the basics of the PHY without specific reference to wireless sensor
Networks. Some of the most crucial points influencing PHY design in wireless sensor networks
are:
• Low power consumption.
• As one consequence: small transmit power and thus a small transmission range.
• As a further consequence: low duty cycle. Most hardware should be switched off or operated in
a low-power standby mode most of the time.
• Comparably low data rates, on the order of tens to hundreds kilobits per second, required.
• Low implementation complexity and costs.
• Low degree of mobility.
• A small form factor for the overall node.

2. MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks:

The specific requirements and design considerations for MAC protocols in wireless sensor
networks.

Balance of requirements

 For the case of WSNs, the balance of requirements is different from traditional (wireless)
networks.
 The importance of energy efficiency for the design of MAC protocols is relatively new and
many of the “classical” protocols like ALOHA and CSMA contain no provisions toward
this goal.
 Other typical performance figures like fairness, throughput, or delay tend to play a minor
role in sensor networks.
 The access/transmission delay performance is traded against energy conservation, and
throughput is mostly not an issue either.
 Further important requirements for MAC protocols are scalability and robustness against
frequent topology changes

Energy problems on the MAC layer

 Collisions incur useless receive costs at the destination node, useless transmit costs at the
source node, and the prospect to expend further energy upon packet retransmission.
 Overhearing Unicast frames have one source and one destination node. However, the
wireless medium is a broadcast medium and all the source’s neighbors that are in receive
state hear a packet and drop it when it is not destined to them; these nodes overhear the
packet.
 Protocol overhead Protocol overhead is induced by MAC-related control frames like, for
example, RTS and CTS packets or request packets in demand assignment protocols.
 Idle listening A node being in idle state is ready to receive a packet but is not currently
receiving A design constraint somewhat related to energy concerns is the requirement for
low complexity.

3. Low duty cycle protocols and wakeup concepts:

 Low duty cycle protocols try to avoid spending (much) time in the idle state and to reduce
the communication activities of a sensor node to a minimum.
 In an ideal case, the sleep state is left only when a node is about to transmit or receive packets.
 In several protocols, a periodic wakeup scheme is used. Such schemes exist in different
flavors.
 One is the cycled receiver approach. In this approach, nodes spend most of their time in
the sleep mode and wake up periodically to receive packets from other nodes.
 Another method is to let node B send frequent request packets until one of them hits A’s
listen period and is really answered by A.
 A whole cycle consisting of sleep period and listen period is also called a wakeup period.
The ratio of the listen period length to the wakeup period length is also called the node’s
duty cycle.

4. S-MAC:

 The S-MAC (Sensor-MAC) protocol provides mechanisms to circumvent idle listening,

collisions, and overhearing.
 S-MAC adopts a periodic wakeup scheme, that is, each node alternates between a fixed-
length listen period and a fixed-length sleep period according to its schedule.
 The listen period of S-MAC can be used to receive and transmit packets.
 S-MAC attempts to coordinate the schedules of neighboring nodes such that their listen
periods
1. Start at the same time. A node x’s listen period is subdivided into three different phases:
 In the first phase (SYNCH phase), node x accepts SYNCH packets from its
neighbors.

 In the second phase (RTS phase), x listens for RTS packets from neighboring
nodes.
 In the third phase (CTS phase), node x transmits a CTS packet if an RTS packet
was received in the previous phase.
5. The mediation device protocol:

 The mediation device protocol is compatible with the peer-to-peer communication mode
of the IEEE 802.15.4 low-rate WPAN standard.
 It allows each node in a WSN to go into sleep mode periodically and to wake up only for
short times to receive packets from neighbor nodes.
 There is no global time reference, each node has its own sleeping schedule, and does not
take care of its neighbors sleep schedules.
 Upon each periodic wakeup, a node transmits a short query beacon, indicating its node
address and its willingness to accept packets from other nodes.
 The node stays awake for some short time following the query beacon, to open up a window
for incoming packets. If no packet is received during this window, the node goes back into
sleep mode.
 The dynamic synchronization approach achieves this synchronization without requiring
the transmitter to be awake permanently to detect the destinations query beacon. To achieve
this, a mediation device (MD) is used.
6. Wakeup Radio Concepts:

 The wakeup radio concept strives to achieve this goal by a simple, “powerless” receiver
that can trigger a main receiver if necessary.
 128 MAC protocols one proposed wakeup MAC protocol assumes the presence of several
parallel data channels, separated either in frequency (FDMA) or by choosing different
codes in a CDMA schemes.
 A node wishing to transmit a data packet randomly picks one of the channels and performs
a carrier sensing operation.
 If the channel is busy, the node makes another random channel choice and repeats the
carrier-sensing operation.
 After a certain number of unsuccessful trials, the node backs off for a random time and
starts again.
 If the channel is idle, the node sends a wakeup signal to the intended receiver, indicating
both the receiver identification and the channel to use.
 The receiver wakes up its data transceiver, tunes to the indicated channel, and the data
packet transmission can proceed.
 Afterward, the receiver can switch its data transceiver back into sleep mode.

 This wakeup radio concept has the significant advantage that only the low-power wakeup
transceiver has to be switched on all the time while the much more energy consuming data
transceiver is non sleeping if and only if the node is involved in data transmissions.