The Method of Reducing the Delay Latency to Improve the Efficiency of Power Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks

  • Ho, Jang (Graduate School of Computer Engineering, YeungNam University) ;
  • Son, Jeong-Bong (Graduate School of Computer Engineering, YeungNam University)
  • Published : 2008.06.20

Abstract

Sensor nodes have various energy and computational constraints because of their inexpensive nature and ad-hoc method of deployment. Considerable research has been focused at overcoming these deficiencies through faster media accessing, more energy efficient routing, localization algorithms and system design. Our research attempts to provide a method of improvement MAC performance in these issues. We show that traditional carrier-sense multiple access(CSMA) protocols like IEEE 802.11 do not handle the first constraint adequately, and do not take advantage of the second property, leading to degraded latency and throughput as the network scales in size, We present more efficient method of a medium access for real-time wireless sensor networks. Proposed MAC protocol is a randomized CSMA protocol, but unlike previous legacy protocols, does not use a time-varying contention window from which a node randomly picks a transmission slot. To reduce the latency for the delivery of event reports, it carefully decides a fixed-size contention window, non-uniform probability distribution of transmitting in each slot within the window. We show that it can offer up to several times latency reduction compared to legacy of IEEE 802.11 as the size of the sensor network scales up to 256 nodes using widely used simulator ns-2. We, finally show that proposed MAC scheme comes close to meeting bounds on the best latency achievable by a decentralized CSMA-based MAC protocol for real-time wireless sensor networks which is sensitive to latency.

Keywords