MEDIUM ACCESS CONTROL

PROTOCOLS FORWIRELESS
SENSOR NETWORKS
 INTRODUCTION
• WSNs are typically composed of a large
number of low-cost, low-power,
multifunctional wireless devices deployed
over a geographical area in an ad hoc fashion
and without careful planning.
• Individually, sensing devices are resource
constrained and therefore are only capable of
a limited amount of processing and
communication.
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• effort to achieve communications is the need
for the wireless sensor nodes to self-organize
into a multihop wireless network.
• Consequently, the design of efficient
communications and network protocols for
WSNs becomes crucial for wireless sensor
nodes to carry out successfully the mission for
which they are deployed.

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• The establishment of a multihop wireless network
infrastructure for data transfer requires the establishment
of communication links between neighboring sensor nodes.
• Unlike communication over a guided medium in wired
networks, however, communication in wireless networks is
achieved in the form of electromagnetic signal transmission
through the air.
• This common transmission medium must therefore be
shared by all sensor network nodes in a fair manner. To
achieve this goal, a medium access control protocol must
be utilized.

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 5.2 BACKGROUND
• Communication among wireless sensor nodes is usually
achieved by means of a unique channel.
• It is the characteristic of this channel that only a single
node can transmit a message at any given time.
• Therefore, shared access of the channel requires the
establishment of a MAC protocol among the sensor nodes.
• The objective of the MAC protocol is to regulate access to
the shared wireless medium such that the performance
requirements of the underlying application are satisfied

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 The physical layer (PHY
• includes a specification of the transmission medium and the
topology of the network
• It defines the procedures and functions that must be
performed by the physical device and the communications
interface to achieve bit transmission and reception.
• It also coordinates the various functions necessary to transmit
a stream of bits over the wireless communication medium.
• The major services provided by the physical layer typically
include the encoding and decoding of signals, preamble
generation and removal to achieve synchronization, and the
transmission and reception of bits.

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The MAC sublayer resides directly above the physical
layer. It supports the following basic functions:

• The assembly of data into a frame for transmission by

appending a header field containing addressing
information and a trailer field for error detection
• The disassembly of a received frame to extract addressing
and error control information to perform address
recognition and error detection and recovery
• The LLC sublayer of the DDL provides a direct interface to
the upper layer protocols. Its main purpose is to shield the
upper layer protocols from the characteristics of the
underlying physical network, thereby providing
interoperability across different types of networks.
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 5.3 FUNDAMENTALS OF MAC PROTOCOLS

• One major difficulty in designing effective

MAC protocols for shared access media arises
from the spatial distribution of the
communicating nodes
• To reach agreement as to which node can
access the communication channel at any
given time, the nodes must exchange some
amount of coordinating information

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 Performance Requirements
• Delay : Delay refers to the amount of time spent by a data packet in
the MAC layer before it is transmitted successfully. Two types of delay
guarantees can be identified, probabilistic and deterministic.
• Throughput : Throughput is typically defined as the rate at which
messages are serviced by a communication system.
• Robustness : Robustness, defined as a combination of reliability,
availability, and dependability requirements, reflects the degree of the
protocol insensitivity to errors and misinformation.
• Scalability : Scalability refers to the ability of a communications
system to meet its performance characteristics regardless of the size
of the network or the number of competing nodes.
• Stability : Stability refers to the ability of a communications system to
handle fluctuations of the traffic load over sustained periods of time.

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 Performance Requirements (2)
• Fairness : A MAC protocol is considered to be fair if
it allocates channel capacity evenly among the
competing communicating nodes without unduly
reducing the network throughput.
• Energy Efficiency : The integration of low-power
chips in the design of sensor nodes is a necessary
step toward achieving high levels of power efficiency.
• source of energy waste : collision, idle listening,
overhearing, control packet overhead, frequent
switching
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 Common Protocols
• Fixed-Assignment Protocols : FDMA, TDMA,
CDMA.
• Demand Assignment Protocols: Polling,
Reservation
• Random Assignment Protocols : ALOHA ,
CSMA (CSMA/CD , CSMA/CA)

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 5.4 MAC PROTOCOLS FOR WSNs
• The need to conserve energy is the most
critical issue in the design of scalable and
stable MAC layer protocols for WSNs.
• Several factors contribute to energy waste,
including excessive overhead, idle listening,
packet collisions, and overhearing.

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 MAC PROTOCOLS FOR WSNs (2)
• Schedule-Based Protocols:
– Self-Organizing Medium Access Control for
Sensornets (SMACS)
– Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH)

• Random Access-Based Protocols

– STEM
– T-MAC
– B-MAC
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IEEE 802.15.4 LR-WPANs STANDARD CASE STUDY

• The main design objective of the IEEE 802.15.4 open

standard is to support the wireless connectivity of a vast
number of industrial, home, and medical applications,
including automotive monitoring and control, home
automation, ubiquitous and pervasive health care, gaming,
and sensor-rich environments.
• Such applications require a small, low-cost, highly reliable
technology that offers long battery life, measured in months
or even years, and automatic or semiautomatic installation.
• The IEEE 802.15.4 standard has been adopted by the ZigBee
Alliance for wireless personal area network technology

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• Furthermore, to support operation of the MAC
layer, the PHY layer includes a variety of features,
such as receiver energy detection (RED), link
quality indicator (LQI), and clear channel
assessment (CCA). The PHY layer is also specified
with a wide range of operational low-power
features, including low-duty-cycle operations,
strict power management, and low transmission
overhead. These parameters are listed in Table
5.1.
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 5.6.1 PHY Layer
• The design of the PHY layer is driven by the need for a low-cost
power-effective physical layer for cost-sensitive low-data-rate
monitoring and control applications.
• Under IEEE 802.15.4, wireless links can operate in three
unlicensed frequency bands: 858 MHz, 902 to 928 MHz, and 2.4
GHz. Based on these frequency bands, the IEEE 802.15.4 standard
defines three physical media:
– Direct-sequence spread spectrum using BPSK operating in the 868-MHz
band at a data rate of 20 kbps
– Direct-sequence spread spectrum using BPSK operating in the 915-MHz
band at a data rate of 40 kbps
– Direct-sequence spread spectrum using O-QPSK operating in the 2.4-
GHz band at a data rate of 140 kbps

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 Device Types and Network Topologies
• To accommodate the MAC protocol, the IEEE
802.15.4 standard distinguishes devices based on
their hardware complexity and capability.
Accordingly, the standard defines two classes of
physical devices: a full-function device (FFD) and a
reduced-function device (RFD).

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• Based on these physical device types, ZigBee defines a variety of
logical device types. These logical devices are distinguished based on
their physical capabilities and the role they play in the network
deployed.
– Network coordinator: an FFD device responsible for network establishment
and control. The coordinator is responsible for choosing key parameters of
the network configuration and for starting the network.
– Router: an FFD device that supports the data routing functionality, including
acting as an intermediate device to link different components of the
network and forwarding message between remote devices across multihop
paths.
– End devices: an RFD device that contains just enough functionality to
communicate with its parent node: the network coordinator or a router. An
end device does not have the capability to relay data messages to other end
devices.
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• Based on these logical devices types, a ZigBee
wireless personal area network (PAN) can be
organized in one of three possible topologies:
a star, a mesh (peer to-peer), or a cluster tree.

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• Cluster tree networks enable a peer-to-peer
network to be formed with a minimum of routing
overhead, using multihop routing. The topology is
suitable for latency-tolerant applications.
• A cluster tree network is self-organized and
supports network redundancy to achieve a high
degree of fault resistance and self-repair. The
cluster can be significantly large, comprising up to
255 clusters of up to 254 nodes each, for a total of
64,770 nodes.
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 The IEEE 802.15.4 defines four basic frame
types:
• the beacon frame: is transmitted periodically by the coordinator
– The frame serves multiple purposes, including identifying the network and its
structure, waking up devices from the sleep mode to the listening mode, and
synchronizing network operations. The beacon frames are particularly important in
mesh and cluster-tree network topologies. They keep all the network nodes
synchronized without requiring these nodes to remain awake for long period of
times, thereby reducing considerably energy consumption and extending battery
lifetime.
• the data frame
– carries a payload of up to 104 octets. Each data frame carries a sequence number
that identifies the frame uniquely
• the acknowledgment frame
– is used by a receiver to acknowledge the receipt of a data frame.
• the MAC command frame
– is used by the MAC entities in different devices for negotiation and communication.

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 Modes of Operation
• The IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol is designed to
meet the requirements of multiple types of
traffic. Each traffic type is characterized by its
unique characteristics in terms of the data
profile and latency requirement.
– periodic data
– intermittent data
– repetitive low-latency data

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 5.7 CONCLUSION
• Sensor networking is an emerging technology that has a wide range of
potential applications, including critical infrastructure protection,
environmental monitoring, smart spaces, ubiquitous and pervasive health
care, and robotic exploration.
• A WSN normally consists of a large number of distributed, battery-operated
nodes equipped with one or more sensors, embedded processors, and low-
power radios.
• These nodes cooperate to organize themselves into a multihop wireless
network. The design of efficient MAC-layer protocols for WSNs is crucial for
the wireless sensor nodes to carry out successfully the mission for which they
are deployed.
• The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is designed to provide support for low-data-rate
connectivity among relatively inexpensive, minimally powered devices.
• The development of a MAC-layer protocol for sensor networks is likely to
continue to be a topic of interest as new WSNs continue to emerge.
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