Protocol Design and Implementation For Wireless Sensor Network

Protocol Design and Implementation for
Wireless Sensor Networks

PIERGIUSEPPE DI MARCO
Masters Degree Project
Stockholm, Sweden April 2008
XR-EE-RT 2008:005
Abstract
Designing ecient and reliable communication protocols for wireless sensor
networks in indoor monitoring applications is a challenging task, due to the
uncertainty and dynamics of the environment.
We consider SERAN, a two-layer semi-random protocol that species a
routing algorithm and a MAC layer for clustered wireless sensor networks.
It combines a randomized and a deterministic approach: the former provides
robustness over unreliable channels, the latter reduces the packet collisions.
We provide a mathematical model for the protocol that allows us to analyze
its behavior and optimize performance. We dene an optimization problem,
considering the energy consumption as objective function and constraints in
terms of error rate and end-to-end delay.
A TinyOS implementation of the protocol on a WSN test bed composed
by Moteivs Tmote Sky wireless sensors is presented. Experimental results
validate the model and show excellent performance for low data rate trans-
missions, with low average node duty cycle, which yields a long network
lifetime.
I
Contents
Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Motivations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Problem Formulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 Contribution of the Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.4 Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2 Wireless Sensor Networks: an Overview 4
2.1 Wireless Sensor Networks Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2 Research Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.3 Protocol Stack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.4 Routing Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.4.1 Classication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.5 MAC Protocols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.5.1 Scheduled-based Protocols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.5.2 Contention-based Protocols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.5.3 MAC Protocols for WSN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.6 Cross-Layer Protocol Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.6.1 LEACH Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.6.2 Breath Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.6.3 SERAN Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3 Model and Optimization Problem 22
3.1 Assumptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.2 Routing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.3 Hybrid MAC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.4 Mathematical Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.4.1 Absorption Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
II
3.4.2 Access Probability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.4.3 Scheduling Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.4.4 Sustainable Trac . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.5 Energy Consumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3.6 Latency Requirement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.7 Error Rate Requirement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.7.1 Problem Formulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.7.2 P(n,S,k) Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.7.3 Packet Reception Rate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.8 Optimization Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4 Protocol Implementation 43
4.1 Hardware Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
4.1.1 Tmote Sky platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
4.2 Software Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4.2.1 TinyOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4.3 Time Synchronization and Network Initialization . . . . . . . 49
4.3.1 Token Passing Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
4.4 MAC/Routing Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
4.4.1 Acknowledgement Mechanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
4.5 Network Lifetime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
4.5.1 Characterization of the CC2420 Transceiver . . . . . . 55
4.5.2 Battery Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4.6 Drawbacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
5 Experimental Results 59
5.1 Network Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
5.2 Validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
5.3 Performance Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
5.4 Network Lifetime Estimation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
6 Conclusions 70
6.1 Conclusions of the Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
6.2 Future Developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
A Protocol Parameters 72
B Packet Structure 74
III
References 76
IV
List of Figures
1.1 Automatic Production Line (courtesy of ABB web site - avail-
able: http://www.abb.com) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2.1 Architectural layers of a WSN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.2 Routing Protocols in WSNs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.1 Connectivity graph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.2 Hybrid MAC representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.3 Markov Chain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.4 Expected forwarding time in number of CSMA-slot for p = 1/k 30
3.5 Example of Scheduling Table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.6 Markov Chain for n = 1, S = 4, k = 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3.7 PRR vs.(S k), for dierent values of k . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
3.8 S vs.k, for xed values of PRR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
3.9 PRR vs.(S k), for k = 3 - upper and lower bounds . . . . . 41
4.1 Tmote Sky platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4.2 Flow diagram of SERAN Protocol: transmission side (left)
and receiving side (right) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
4.3 Architectural layers of CC2420 Radio stack . . . . . . . . . . . 53
4.4 State diagram and typical current consumption and transition
times for CC2420 transceiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
5.1 Test-bed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
5.2 Network Topology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
5.3 Packet Reception Rate vs. TDMA-slot duration for k = 3 . . . 61
5.4 Average Delay, = 1pkt/10s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
5.5 Average Duty Cycle, = 1pkt/10s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
5.6 Delay distribution for clusters 1, 2 and 4 (3,2 and 1 hops to
the Controller) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
V
5.7 Average Delay, = 3pkt/10s (left) = 1pkt/5s (right) . . . . 67
5.8 Average Duty Cycle, = 3pkt/10s (left) = 1pkt/5s (right) . 67
5.9 Time distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
VI
List of Tables
4.1 Node power consumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4.2 Node energy specication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
5.1 Validation: average values of PRR, delay and duty cycle . . . 62
5.2 Performance analysis: average values of PRR, delay and duty
cycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
5.3 Time distribution and energy consumption in a TDMA-cycle . 68
VII
Chapter 1
Introduction
The rapid evolution of wireless technologies and the signicant growth of
wireless network services have made wireless communications an ubiquitous
means for transporting information across many dierent domains. Within
the framework of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), there are many potential
possibilities where a WSN can be deployed to support numerous applications.
However, the current applications in real-life are very limited. The main
reason for the delay in the adoption is the lack of a system level approach.
This is a design methodology that, given a set of application constraints, is
able to synthesize a design solution that guarantees the required latency and
quality of service subject to unreliable channel conditions.
1.1 Motivations
Our approach is mainly motivated by industrial control applications. In
particular, we are interested in designing WSNs in manufacturing cells, as
in automatic production lines (Fig. 1.1). A WSN is deployed to measure
sensitive parameters in specic regions and to send it to a controller.
Although there are several papers ([1], [2] and [3]) that model the net-
working performance of WSNs, the practical evaluations of networking in
real test-bed environments are limited (paper [6]). The variability of the
wireless environment and the simplied hypotheses, often assumed in these
models, attribute great importance to the implementation stage. Conse-
quently, we focused our eorts on the practical implementation, trying to
mediate between the need of abstraction in the theoretical model and physi-
1
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 2
Figure 1.1: Automatic Production Line (courtesy of ABB web site - available:
http://www.abb.com)
cal constraints on the platforms. We chose SERAN, a semi-random protocol
for clustered WSNs, originally designed for manufacturing applications [1].
1.2 Problem Formulation
This study will evaluate the performance of the SERAN protocol in WSNs
in real environments.
The main aim of protocols like SERAN is the maximization of the net-
work lifetime subject to application requirements.
In paper [1], Bonivento et al. proposed a mathematical model and the re-
lated optimization problem for SERAN. The objective function is the energy
consumption and the constraint is the delay. The problem is expressed as:
minimize E
tot
subject to D D
max
(1.1)
According to the approach proposed in papers [3] and [6], we decided to
improve it, inserting a requirement on the error rate. We analyzed the per-
formance considering the probability that a packet is received at destination
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 3
(Packet Reception Rate) greater than a xed threshold.
minimize E
tot
subject to PRR PRR
min
D D
max
(1.2)
1.3 Contribution of the Thesis
The main contributions of this thesis are two:
1. denition of a mathematical analysis of Packet Reception Rate (PRR)
in SERAN, to enhance the optimization problem.
2. implementation of the protocol on real motes and performance evalua-
tion in a test-bed environment.
1.4 Outline
In Chapter 2 we describe general features of WSNs and introduce design
aspects of MAC and routing layer, with considerations about the cross-layer
design. In Chapter 3 the mathematical model is presented, referring to the
SERAN protocol. The implementation aspects are described in Chapter 4,
while in Chapter 5 the experimental results are presented and discussed.
Conclusions and future works are resumed in Chapter 6.
Chapter 2
Wireless Sensor Networks: an
Overview
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are ad-hoc networks, consisting of spa-
tially distributed devices (motes) using sensor nodes to cooperatively monitor
physical or environmental conditions at dierent locations.
Devices in a WSN are resource constrained; they have low processing
speed, storage capacity, and communication bandwidth. In most settings,
the network must operate for long periods of time, but the nodes are bat-
tery powered, so the available energy resources limit their overall operation.
To minimize energy consumption, most of the device components, including
the radio, should be switched o most of the time [7]. Another important
characteristic is that sensor nodes have signicant processing capability in
the ensemble, but not individually. Nodes have to organize themselves, ad-
ministering and managing the network all together, and it is much harder
than controlling individual devices. Furthermore, changes in the physical
environment where a network is deployed make also nodes experience wide
variations in connectivity and it inuences the networking protocols.
The main factors that complicate the protocol design for WSNs can be
summarized in:
Fault tolerance: the necessity to sustain sensor networks functionalities
without any interruption, after a node failure.
Scalability: the possibility to enlarge and reduce the network.
Deployment: given a certain environment it should be possible to nd
4
CHAPTER 2. WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS: AN OVERVIEW 5
the suitable deploying location for each sensor.
Power management: the network lifetime needs to be maximized.
In spite of a greater eort required for building a WSN, the interest in
this technology is increasing. Recently a noteworthy research area covered
WSNs and applications in industrial and commercial eld but a lot of work
has to be done to discover and exploit all their potentialities.
2.1 Wireless Sensor Networks Applications
The uses of WSN are generally classied into [7]:
monitoring space
monitoring targets
The former category includes for instance habitat monitoring, precision agri-
culture, electronic surveillance, intelligent alarms and generally what is called
domotics
1
. The latter category embraces structural monitoring
2
, medical
diagnostics, industrial equipment maintenance and urban terrain mapping.
Another category is represented by hybrid WSN, where the aim is to con-
trol the interaction between targets with each other and the surrounding
environment. Emergency management, for example, involves risk analysis,
prevention, supporting activities and recovering after disasters; it has civil
implications but it is also important in terms of industrial emergency re-
sponse (nuclear plants).
Security applications WSNs may be used for infrastructure security and
counterterrorism applications. Critical buildings and facilities such as power
plants and communication centers should be preserved from potential ter-
rorists. Integrated networks of video, acoustic, and other sensors can be
deployed around these facilities. These sensors can guarantee early detection
of possible trouble. Improved coverage and detection and a reduced false
alarm rate can be achieved by fusing the data from multiple sensors. Even
1
It is a eld within building automation, oriented to the application of automation
techniques for the comfort and security of homes and their residents (internal climate or
lighting control, re and gas detection...)
2
Used in earthquake engineering science
though xed sensors connected by a xed communication network protect
most facilities, wireless ad hoc networks can provide more exibility and ad-
ditional coverage when needed. WSNs can also be used to detect biological,
chemical, and nuclear attacks.
Industrial control Industry has shown interest in sensing as a means of
lowering cost and improving machine and user performance and maintain-
ability. Nowadays it is possible to monitor the machine state through de-
termination of vibration or lubrication levels. Sensors can be inserted into
regions inaccessible by humans. Remote wireless sensors can allow a fac-
tory to be equipped, after the fact to guarantee and maintain compliance
with safety laws and guidelines while keeping installation costs low. In an
industrial environment spectral sensors
3
are often used. Optical sensors
4
can
replace existing instruments and perform material property and composition
measurements. Optical sensing is also facilitated by miniaturization. The
goal of this and other industrial applications of WSNs is to enable multi-
point or matrix sensing: inputs from hundreds or thousands of sensors feed
into databases that can be queried in any number of ways to show real-time
information on a large or small scale.
Environmental monitoring Environmental sensors can be used to study
vegetation response to climatic trends and diseases, and acoustic and imag-
ing sensors can identify, track and measure the population of animals, for
example birds or endangered species.
Trac control WSNs are nowadays used for vehicle trac monitoring and
control. Most trac intersections have either overhead or buried sensors to
detect vehicles and control trac lights. Video cameras are frequently used to
monitor road segments with heavy trac, with the video sent to human op-
erators at central locations. However, these sensors and the communication
network that connect them are costly, so trac monitoring is usually limited
to a few critical points. Inexpensive wireless ad hoc networks will completely
change the scenario in the trac monitoring and control. Cheap sensors with
embedded networking capability can be deployed at every road intersection
to detect and count vehicle trac and estimate its speed. The sensors will
3
They collect and transmit data from dierent parts of the electromagnetic spectrum
4
They works in the optical wavelength range
communicate with neighboring nodes to eventually develop a global trac
picture, which can be handled by human operators or automatic controllers
to generate control operations. A dierent and more radical revolution is
the sensors attached to each vehicle. As the vehicles pass each other, they
exchange summary information on the location and the speed and density of
trac, information that may be generated by ground sensors. These sum-
maries propagate from vehicle to vehicle and can be used by drivers to avoid
trac congestion and organize alternative routes.
2.2 Research Challenges
Hardware and software constraints originate a lot of design issues that must
be addressed to achieve an eective and ecient operation of WSNs. Besides,
new application scenarios lead to new challenges. The following are just
examples of some open questions:
Energy-aware algorithms: sensor nodes are powered by external bat-
teries and it can be dicult to replace them when consumed (often
sensor nodes are deployed in remote and hostile environments), so it is
critical to design algorithms and protocols that utilize minimal energy.
To do that, implementers must reduce communication between sensor
nodes, simplify computations and apply lightweight security solutions.
Location discovery: many applications that can track an object require
knowing the exact or approximate physical location of a sensor node,
in order to link sensed data with the object under analysis. So many
geographical routing protocols need the location of sensor nodes to
forward data among the networks. Location discovery protocols must
be designed in such a way that minimum information is needed to be
exchanged among nodes to discover their location. Solutions like GPS
are not recommended because of the energy consumption and the price
of the components.
Cost: this is another factor that inuences design. Manufacturers try
to keep the cost at minimum levels since most sensor nodes are usually
needed for many applications. New technologies are always costly. If
the cost is high, the adoption and spread of sensor technology will be
prohibitive.
Security: it is not possible to introduce a new technology without con-
sidering security aspects. However, as it happens with other technolo-
gies, security is not the top priority when designing something new.
Security solutions are constrained when applying them to sensor net-
works. For example, cryptography requires complex processing to pro-
vide encryption to the transmitted data. Some of the many issues
that need to be addressed in a security context are: secure routing, se-
cure discovery and verication of location, key establishment and trust
setup, attacks against sensor nodes, secure group management and se-
cure data aggregation.
2.3 Protocol Stack
A simplied protocol stack for a WSN is summarized in Fig. 2.1.
Network
Data Link
Physical
Transport
Application
Figure 2.1: Architectural layers of a WSN
We can consider four main levels [13]:
Application layer: It denes a standard set of services and interface
primitives available to a programmer independently on their implemen-
tation on every kind of platform. An example is the so called sensor
network services platform (SNSP) [14].
Transport layer: It helps to maintain the ow of data if the sensor
networks application requires it. This layer is especially needed when
the system is planned to be accessed through Internet or other external
networks. Unlike protocols such as TCP, the end-to-end communica-
tion schemes in sensor networks are not based on global addressing.
Therefore, new schemes that split the end-to-end communication prob-
ably at the sinks may be needed.
Network layer: It takes care of routing the data, directing the process
of selecting paths along which to send data in the network.
Data Link layer: It provides the multiplexing of data streams, data
frame detection and medium access control (MAC).
Physical layer: it is responsible for frequency and power selection,
modulation, and data encryption.
2.4 Routing Techniques
Routing in WSNs is a hard challenge due to the inherent characteristics that
distinguish these networks from other wireless networks like mobile ad hoc
networks or cellular networks [9]. Some important aspects are listed below.
Node deployment. It is application-dependent and can be either manual
(deterministic) or randomized. Position awareness of sensor nodes is also
important, since data collection is normally based on the location;
Energy consumption without losing accuracy. Sensor nodes are tightly
constrained in terms of energy, processing, and storage capacities, so they re-
quire careful resource management. The lifetime of nodes is a critical issue
because of the limited battery lifetime. In multi-hop networks, the malfunc-
tioning of some sensor nodes due to power failure can cause signicant topo-
logical changes, and might require rerouting of packets and reorganization of
the network.
Data reporting method. It can be categorized as:
time-driven, when data are transmitted at constant periodic time in-
tervals;
event-driven, when sensor nodes react immediately to the occurrence
of a certain event;
query-driven, when sensor nodes respond to a query generated by the
BS or another node in the network.
It can be also a hybrid of all previous methods. The routing protocol is highly
inuenced by the data reporting method in terms of energy consumption and
route calculations.
Node/link heterogeneity. In many studies, all sensor nodes were as-
sumed to be homogeneous (e.g. have equal capacities in terms of computa-
tion, communication, and power), but, depending on the application, a sensor
node can have a dierent role or capability. For example, some applications
might require a diverse mixture of sensors for monitoring temperature, pres-
sure, and humidity of the surrounding environment, detecting motion via
acoustic signatures, and capturing images or video tracking of moving ob-
jects. Even data reading and reporting can be generated from these sensors
at dierent rates, subject to diverse QoS constraints, and can follow multiple
data reporting models.
Fault tolerance. Some sensor nodes may fail or be blocked due to lack of
power, physical damage, or environmental interference. The failure of sensor
nodes should not aect the overall task of the sensor network.
Scalability. Routing scheme must be able to work with a huge number
of sensor nodes. In addition, sensor network routing protocols should be
scalable enough to respond to events in the environment.
Network dynamics. In many applications both the base station or sensor
nodes can be mobile. The routing protocol should consider this eventuality,
making the design more complicated.
Addressing scheme. The relative large number of sensor nodes and the
constraint in terms of overhead does not allow building a global addressing
scheme as IP-based protocols.
Transmission media. The traditional problems associated with a wireless
channel (e.g. fading, high error rate) may aect the operation of the sensor
network. In general, the required bandwidth of sensor data will be low, on
the order of 1100 kb/s. Related to the transmission media is the design
of MAC. One approach to MAC design for sensor networks is to use time-
division multiple access (TDMA)-based protocols that conserve more energy
than contention-based protocols like carrier sense multiple access (CSMA)
(e.g. IEEE 802.11). Bluetooth technology can also be used.
Connectivity. High node density in sensor networks precludes them from
being completely isolated from each other and sensor nodes are expected to
be highly connected. However, it may not prevent the network topology from
being variable and the network size from reducing due to sensor node failures.
In addition, connectivity depends on the possibly random distribution of
nodes.
Coverage. A given sensors view of the environment is limited in both
range and accuracy; it can only cover a limited physical area of the environ-
ment.
Data aggregation. Data sensed by many sensors in WSNs is typically
based on common phenomena, so there is a high probability that this data
has some redundancy, which needs to be exploited by the routing protocols to
improve energy and bandwidth utilization. Data aggregation is the combina-
tion of data from dierent sources according to a certain aggregation function
(e.g. duplicate suppression, minima, maxima and average). This technique
has been used to achieve energy eciency and data transfer optimization in
a number of routing protocols.
Quality of service. In many applications, conservation of energy is con-
sidered relatively more important than the quality of data sent. Hence, as
energy is depleted, the network may be required to reduce the quality of re-
sults in order to reduce energy dissipation in the nodes (energy-aware routing
protocol).
Consequently, routing, power management and data dissemination pro-
tocols for WSNs must be specically designed.
Network-Structure-based
Protocol-Operation-based
Flat
Negotiation-
based
Multipath-
based
Query-
based
QoS-based
Coherent-
based
Hierarchical
Location-
based
Figure 2.2: Routing Protocols in WSNs
2.4.1 Classication
Routing protocols in WSNs might dier depending on the application (Proto-
col-Operation-based) and network architecture (Network-Structure-based) as
shown in Fig. 2.2. Based on the underlying network there are three protocol
categories:
Flat Routing: each node plays the same role and sensor nodes col-
laborate to perform the sensing task.
Hierarchical (Cluster-based) Routing: higher-energy nodes are
used to process and send the information, while low-energy nodes are
used to perform the sensing in the proximity of the target. The cre-
ation of clusters and assigning special tasks to cluster heads can greatly
contribute to overall system scalability, lifetime, and energy eciency.
Hierarchical routing is an ecient way to lower energy consumption
within a cluster, performing data aggregation and fusion in order to
decrease the number of transmitted messages to the sink node;
Location-based: sensor nodes are addressed by means of their loca-
tions. The distance between neighboring nodes can be estimated on the
basis of incoming signal strengths. Relative coordinates of neighboring
nodes can be obtained by exchanging such information between neigh-
bors or by communicating with a satellite using GPS. To save energy,
some location-based schemes demand that nodes should go to sleep if
there is no activity.
Depending on the protocol operation we can divide routing protocols in:
Multipath-based: use multiple paths rather than a single path in
order to enhance network performance. For instance the fault tolerance
can be increased by maintaining multiple paths between the source and
destination at the expense of increased energy consumption and trac
generation.
Query-based: the destination nodes propagate a query for data from
a node through the network, a node with this data sends the data that
matches the query back to the node that initiated it.
Negotiation-based: use negotiation in order to eliminate redundant
data transmissions. Communication decisions are also made based on
the resources available.
QoS-based: when delivering data, the network balances between en-
ergy consumption and data quality through certain QoS metrics as
delay, energy or bandwidth.
Coherent-based: the entity of local data processing on the nodes
distinguish between coherent (minimum processing) and non-coherent
(full processing) routing protocols.
2.5 MAC Protocols
MAC protocols can be roughly divided into two groups [15]: scheduled-based
and contention-based protocol.
2.5.1 Scheduled-based Protocols
Scheduled protocols are very attractive for applications in sensor networks
because of their energy eciency. Since slots are pre-allocated to individual
nodes, they are collision-free. These protocols are characterized by a duty
cycle built-in with the inherent collision-free nature that ensure low energy
consumption. On the other side, the complexity of the design is high due to
problems of synchronization. In general, they are not exible to changes in
node density or movement, and lack of peer-to-peer communication.
The representative schedule-based protocols are:
Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA): it allows several users
to share the same frequency channel by dividing the signal into dif-
ferent time-slots. It has a natural advantage of collision free medium
access. It supports low duty cycle operation: a node only needs to turn
on its radio during the slot that it is assigned to transmit or receive.
However, it includes clock drift problems and decreased throughput at
low trac loads due to idle slots. The limits with TDMA systems are
synchronization of the nodes and adaptation to topology changes (i.e.
insertion of new nodes, exhaustion of battery capacities, and corrupted
links due to interference). The slot assignments, therefore, should be
done with regard to such possibilities. However, it is not easy to change
the slot assignment within a decentralized environment for traditional
TDMA, since all nodes must agree on the slot assignments.
Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA): it allocates users
with dierent carrier frequencies of the radio spectrum. It is another
scheme that oers a collision-free medium, but it requires additional
hardware to dynamically communicate with dierent radio channels.
This increases the cost of the sensor nodes, which is in contrast with
the philosophy of sensor network systems.
Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA): it employs spread spec-
trum technology and a special coding scheme (where each transmitter
is assigned a code) to allow multiple users to be multiplexed over the
same physical channel. It also oers a collision-free medium, but its
high computational requirement is a major obstacle for the minimum
energy consumption objective in WSNs.
2.5.2 Contention-based Protocols
Contention schemes dier in principle from scheduled schemes since a trans-
mitting user is not guaranteed to be successful. Unlike scheduled proto-
cols, contention protocols do not divide the channel into sub-channels or
pre-allocate the channel for each node to use. Instead, a common channel
is shared by all nodes and it is allocated on demand. At any moment, a
contention mechanism is employed to decide which node has the right to ac-
cess the channel. Contention protocols have several advantages compared to
scheduled protocols. First, because contention protocols allocate resources on
demand, they can scale more easily across changes in node density or trac
load. Second, contention protocols can be more exible as topologies change.
There is no requirement to form communication clusters, and peer-to-peer
communication is directly supported. Finally, contention protocols do not
require ne-grained time synchronization as in TDMA protocols. The major
disadvantage of a contention protocol is its inecient usage of energy. The
resolution process does consume resources. If the probability of interference
is small, such as might be the case with bursty users, taking the chance of
having to resolve the interference compensates for the resources that have to
be expanded to ensure freedom of conicts. Moreover, in most conict-free
protocols, idle users do consume a portion of the channel resources; this por-
tion becomes major when the number of potential users in the system is very
large to the extent that conict-free schemes are impractical. In contention
schemes idle users do not transmit and thus do not consume any portion of
the channel resources.
The representative contention-based protocols are:
ALOHA: a node simply transmits a packet when it is generated (pure
ALOHA) or at the next available slot (slotted ALOHA). Should the
transmission be unsuccessful, every colliding user, independently of the
others, schedules its retransmission to a random time in the future.
This randomness is required to ensure that the same set of packets
does not continue to collide indenitely.
Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA): when a user generates a
new packet the channel is sensed and if found idle the packet is trans-
mitted. When a collision takes place every transmitting user resched-
ules a retransmission of the collided packet to some other time in the
future (chosen randomly) when the same operation will be repeated.
In accordance with common networking lore, CSMA methods have a
lower delay and promising throughput potential at lower trac loads,
which generally happens to be the case in WSNs. However, additional
collision avoidance or collision detection methods should be employed.
2.5.3 MAC Protocols for WSN
Medium Access Control protocols designed for wireless LANs have been op-
timized for maximum throughput and minimum delay, while the low energy
consumption has been left as a secondary requirement. In WSNs, energy ef-
ciency is the main task. There are large opportunities of energy savings at
the MAC layer. In parer [15] four sources of energy waste have been identi-
ed: collisions, control packet overhead, listening to a transmission destined
to someone else (overhearing) and idle listening. Most important source of
energy savings in a sensor network is to avoid idle listening. One way to avoid
idle listening is to use the TDMA protocol, but various protocol solutions
have been proposed in this direction.
IEEE 802.11 MAC
IEEE 802.11 is the rst wireless LAN (WLAN) standard proposed in 1997
[21]. The medium access mechanism, called the Distributed Coordination
Function, is basically a Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoid-
ance mechanism (CSMA/CA). A station wanting to transmit senses the
medium. If the medium is busy then it defers. If the medium is free for
a specied time (called Distributed Inter Frame Space, DIFS in the stan-
dard), then the station is allowed to transmit. The receiving station checks
the CRC of the received packet and sends an acknowledgment packet. If
the sender does not receive the ACK, then it retransmits the frame until
it receives ACK or is thrown away after a given number of retransmissions.
According to the standard, a maximum of seven retransmissions are allowed
before the frame drops.
In order to reduce the probability of two stations colliding due to not hear-
ing each other, which is well-known as the hidden node problem, the stan-
dard denes a Virtual Carrier Sense mechanism: a station wanting to trans-
mit a packet rst transmits a short control packet called RTS (Request To
Send), which includes the source, destination, and the duration of the in-
tended packet and ACK transaction. The destination station responds (if
the medium is free) with a response control packet called CTS (Clear to
Send), which includes the same duration information.
Obviously, collisions are still possible because the eciency of CSMA/CA
depends on the sensing range of each node and the presence of a hidden sta-
tion. In general, the performances of CSMA/CA are strictly related to the
network topology and the nodes density: the more nodes can hear each other
the better quality of communication can be achieved avoiding collisions. In-
evitably, large latency times aect the eciency of the system, because before
transmitting each station has to wait an unpredictable amount of time that
mainly depends on the demands of users and topology of the network.
Sensor MAC (S-MAC)
The basic concept behind the Sensor-MAC (S-MAC) protocol is the locally
managed synchronization and the periodic sleeplisten schedules [17]. Basi-
cally built in a contention-based fashion, S-MAC strives to retain the exibil-
ity of contention-based protocols while improving energy eciency in multi-
hop networks. S-MAC includes approaches to reduce energy consumption
from all the major sources of energy waste: idle listening, collision, over-
hearing and control overhead. Neighboring nodes form virtual clusters so
as to set up a common sleep schedule. If two neighboring nodes reside in
two dierent virtual clusters, they wake up at the listen periods of both
clusters. Schedule exchanges are accomplished by periodic SYNC packet
broadcasts to immediate neighbors. The period for each node to send a
packet is called the synchronization period. Collision avoidance is achieved
by a carrier sense. Furthermore, RTS/CTS packet exchanges are used for
unicast-type data packets. Periodic sleep may result in high latency, espe-
cially for multi-hop routing algorithms, since all intermediate nodes have
their own sleep schedules. The latency caused by periodic sleeping is called
sleep delay. The adaptive listening technique is proposed to improve the
sleep delay and thus the overall latency. In that technique, the node that
overhears its neighbors transmissions wakes up for a short time at the end of
the transmission. Hence, if the node is the next-hop node, its neighbor could
pass data immediately. The end of the transmissions is known by the dura-
tion eld of the RTS/CTS packets. The energy waste caused by idle listening
is reduced by sleep schedules in S-MAC. In addition to its implementation
simplicity, time synchronization overhead may be prevented by sleep sched-
ule announcements. However broadcast data packets do not use RTS/CTS,
which increases collision probability. Adaptive listening incurs overhearing
or idle listening if the packet is not destined to the listening node. Sleep and
listen periods are predened and constant, which decreases the eciency of
the algorithm under variable trac load.
Timeout MAC (T-MAC)
Timeout-MAC (T-MAC) is proposed to enhance the poor results of the S-
MAC protocol under variable trac loads. As indicated above, the static
sleeplisten periods of S-MAC result in high latency and lower throughput.
In T-MAC, the listen period ends when no activation event has occurred for
a time threshold. The main drawback of this protocol is an early sleeping
problem, as dened in paper [18].
Berkeley MAC (B-MAC)
B-MAC is highly congurable and can be implemented with a small code
and memory size. B-MAC consists of: clear channel assessment (CCA),
packet back-o and link layer acknowledgements. For CCA, B-MAC uses
a weighted moving average of samples when the channel is idle in order to
assess the background noise and to better be able to detect valid packets
and collisions. The packet back-o time is congurable and is chosen from
a linear range as opposed to an exponential back-o scheme typically used
in other distributed systems. This reduces delay and works because of the
typical communication patterns found in a WSN. B-MAC also supports a
packet by packet link layer acknowledgement. In this way only important
packets need to pay the extra cost. A low power listening scheme is employed
where a node cycles between awake and sleep cycles. While awake, it listens
for a long enough preamble to assess if it needs to stay awake or can return
to sleep mode. This scheme saves signicant amounts of energy. Many
MAC protocols use a request to send (RTS) and clear to send (CTS) style of
interaction. This works well for ad hoc mesh networks where packet sizes are
large (1000s of bytes). However, the overhead of RTS-CTS packets to set up
a packet transmission is not acceptable in WSNs where packet sizes are on
the order of 50 bytes. B-MAC, therefore, does not use a RTS-CTS scheme.
Zebra MAC (Z-MAC)
Z-MAC is a hybrid MAC scheme for sensor networks that combines the
strengths of TDMA and CSMA while osetting their weaknesses [20]. The
main feature of Z-MAC is its adaptability to the level of contention in the
network so that under low contention, it behaves like CSMA, and under high
contention, like TDMA. By mixing CSMA and TDMA, Z-MAC becomes
more robust to timing failures, time-varying channel conditions, slot assign-
ment failures and topology changes than a stand-alone TDMA. In Z-MAC,
a time slot assignment is performed at the time of deployment and higher
overhead is incurred at the beginning.
Each node is owner of one or more slots, but, unlike TDMA, a node may
transmit during any time slot in Z-MAC. Before a node transmits during a
slot (not necessarily at the beginning of the slot), it always performs carrier-
sensing and transmits a packet when the channel is clear. However, the
owner of that slot always has higher priority over its non-owners in accessing
the channel. The priority is implemented by adjusting the initial contention
window size in such a way that the owners are always given earlier chances
to transmit than non-owners.
There are various MAC protocols for WSNs besides the presented solu-
tions. Optimal choice of MAC protocols is determined by application speci-
ed goals such as accuracy, latency, and energy eciency.
However, B-MAC protocol is widely used because it has good results even
with default parameters and it performs better than the other protocols.
2.6 Cross-Layer Protocol Design
Most of the communication protocols for WSNs follow the traditional layered
protocol architecture. While these protocols may achieve very high perfor-
mance in terms of the metrics related to each of these individual layers, they
are not jointly optimized to maximize the overall network performance while
minimizing the energy consumption [22]. Considering the energy constraint
and processing resources of WSNs, joint optimization and design of network-
ing layers, (i.e. cross-layer design), stands as the most promising alternative
to inecient traditional layered protocol architectures. The central idea of
cross-layer design is to optimize the control and exchange of information over
two or more layers to achieve signicant performance improvements by ex-
ploiting the interactions between various protocol layers.
An important question in the area of cross-layer design is what parameters
need to be shared among dierent layers of the protocol stack and how can
each layer be made robust to the changing network conditions. The benets
and advantages from relaxing the rigid layered structure needs to be quan-
tied, and the associated complexity and stability issues with implementing
such cross-layer design need to be studied more thoroughly.
In literature, the cross-layer design focuses on the interaction or modular-
ity among physical, MAC and routing layers. Some examples of cross-layer
approaches are illustrated, to introduce the SERAN protocol.
2.6.1 LEACH Protocol
Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) is a cluster-based pro-
tocol, which includes distributed cluster formation and a hierarchical clus-
tering algorithm [10]. LEACH randomly selects a few sensor nodes as cluster
heads (CHs) and rotates this role to evenly distribute the energy load among
the sensors in the network. In LEACH, the CH nodes compress data arriv-
ing from nodes that belong to the respective cluster, and send an aggregated
packet to the BS in order to reduce the amount of information that must
be transmitted to the BS. LEACH uses a TDMA/CDMA MAC protocol
to reduce inter-cluster and intra-cluster collisions. However, data collection
is centralized and performed periodically. LEACH is able to increase the
network lifetime, but has some problem linked to the assumptions used:
It should be possible for all nodes to transmit with enough power to
reach the BS if needed. Each node should have computational power
to support dierent MAC protocols, so it is not applicable to networks
deployed in large regions.
It also assumes that nodes always have data to send, and nodes located
close to each other have correlated data. It is not obvious how the
number of predetermined CHs (p) is going to be uniformly distributed
through the network, so there is the possibility that the elected CHs
will be concentrated in one part of the network; hence, some nodes will
not have any CHs in their vicinity.
The idea of dynamic clustering brings extra overhead (head changes,
advertisements, etc.) may diminish the gain in energy consumption.
The protocol assumes that all nodes begin with the same amount of
energy capacity in each election round, assuming that being a CH con-
sumes approximately the same amount of energy for each node.
2.6.2 Breath Protocol
In paper [6] a cross-layer protocol based on a randomized routing, MAC and
duty cycling is presented. According to Breath, a node sends a data packet to
another one randomly selected in a forwarding region, which is located in the
direction toward the sink node of the network. This procedure is driven by
beacon messages exchange from nodes in the forwarding region available to
receive data packets. The MAC is randomized and does not implement any
acknowledgement or retransmission scheme. Each node, either transmitter
or receiver, does not stay in an active state, but goes to sleep for a random
amount of time, which depends on the trac conditions making the duty
cycling algorithm also randomized. Breath is optimized to minimize the
energy consumption of the network while ensuring a desired reliability and
end-to-end delay in the packet delivery. The main drawback of the protocol
is the bad operative condition in terms of high wake up rate.
2.6.3 SERAN Protocol
Originally proposed in paper [1], SERAN is a clustered two-layer protocol
based on a semi-random approach. It combines randomized and determinis-
tic components to jointly dene routing and MAC layer.
Unlike LEACH, SERAN does not have cluster heads and the related prob-
lems. It uses a Hybrid TDMA/CSMA MAC protocol. The TDMA scheme is
implemented at cluster level and reduces the wake up rate, while the CSMA
provides robustness over unreliable channels and an acknowledgement-based
contention scheme allows reducing duplicated packets. A similar double na-
ture is in the routing algorithm. The combined result is a high reliability
and good energy saving.
For these reasons, SERAN seems to be one of the best candidate protocols
for WSNs and it is taken as reference in this work.
Chapter 3
Model and Optimization
Problem
In this chapter we will formulate a mathematical model of SERAN, intro-
ducing the constrained optimization problem and the adopted solution.
As shown in Section 2.2, saving energy is one of the most important
research challenges in WSNs. Sensor nodes are powered by external batteries
and often it is hard to replace them after consuming, while most of the
applications require long lifetime in the order of years. Hence, the choice of
an objective function in terms of energy consumption is clearly justied. On
the other hand, a mere optimization for energy can lead the network to work
without fullling its tasks. Energy eciency has to be well-balanced with
the assigned requirements and network purposes.
Basically, the application requires two constraints:
1. Error rate guarantee: in terms of Packet Reception Rate (PRR) dened
as the probability that a packet is received at destination.
2. End-to-End delay guarantee: in terms of maximum delay between the
furthest node and the destination node.
The problem is rewritten as:
minimize E
tot
subject to PRR PRR
min
D D
max
(3.1)
22
CHAPTER 3. MODEL AND OPTIMIZATION PROBLEM 23
where the objective function E
tot
is the total energy consumption of the
network, PRR
min
is the minimum threshold for the PRR and D
max
is the
maximum admitted end-to-end delay.
3.1 Assumptions
Without loss of generality, SERAN is presented referring to the clustered
topology of Fig. 3.1, as in paper [2]. Each star is a cluster of node and the
connectivity between two clusters is represented by the double arrow. The
Controller, denoted with C in the graph, can be represented by a sink node,
linked to an actual application controller.
C
1
2
4
3
5
C
1
2
4
3
5
Figure 3.1: Connectivity graph
There are some important assumptions to consider:
the Controller knows a priori the number of total nodes, the position
of the clusters and how many nodes are in each cluster;
each node knows to which cluster it belongs.
This means that the Controller has a good estimation of the amount of data
generated by each cluster and the cluster structure is global information
shared in the nodes. From a protocol denition perspective, these are very
useful to simplify the analysis. Moreover, these hypotheses are acceptable in
an industrial monitoring application.
3.2 Routing
The routing solution of SERAN is based on a semi-random scheme.
The routing layer in the protocol stack can be hierarchically subdivided in
two parts:
A static route scheduling performed at cluster level;
A dynamical routing algorithm at node level.
In this way a transmitter has knowledge of the region to which the packet will
be forwarded, but the actual choice of forwarding node is made at random.
This random choice is not performed at the network layer, but it is a result
of an acknowledgment contention scheme performed at the MAC layer by
all the candidate receivers. The overhead of purely random approaches is so
reduced.
The rst step of the SERAN routing algorithm consists of calculating the
shortest path from every cluster to the Controller and generating the mini-
mum spanning tree. In the presented topology (Fig. 3.1) this is represented
by the bold single arrows. Then, packets are forwarded to a randomly chosen
node within the next-hop cluster in their xed path to the Controller.
We can observe that these operations are done without need of a cluster
head node within clusters; nodes need to be aware only of the next-hop
cluster connectivity and do not need a neighbor list of next hop nodes.
3.3 Hybrid MAC
A two-level semi-random scheme is implemented at MAC layer (see Fig. 3.2):
TDMA -cycle TDMA -cycle
TDMA slot 1
TDMA slot 2
TDMA slot N
CSMA slot
Figure 3.2: Hybrid MAC representation
A deterministic MAC with a weighted TDMA Scheme: it regulates
channel access among clusters. The main advantages of using this ap-
proach are the robustness to collision and the reduced energy consump-
tion. During a TDMA-cycle, each cluster is allowed to transmit for a
number of TDMA-slots that is proportional to the amount of trac it
has to forward. A node has to be awake only when it is in its listening
TDMA-slot or its transmitting TDMA-slot if it has a packet to send.
A random based MAC with a p-persistent CSMA Scheme within a sin-
gle TDMA-slot: it manages the communication between the nodes of
the transmitting cluster and the nodes of the receiving cluster within a
single TDMA-slot. It oers exibility to the introduction of new nodes
and robustness to node failures. In SERAN the exibility is obtained
by having the transmitting nodes access the channel in a p-persistent
slotted CSMA fashion [16]. The time granularity of this level is the
CSMA-slot. Furthermore, the CSMA scheme has to support the node
random selection procedure introduced in Section 3.2. The packet is
sent in multi-cast over all nodes of the receiving cluster; then the re-
ceiving nodes implement a random acknowledgment contention scheme
to prevent duplication of the packets. The algorithm is the following:
1. Each of the nodes in the transmitting cluster that has a packet to
send senses the channel at the rst CSMA-slot with probability
p. If the channel is clean, the node tries to multi-cast the packet
to the nodes of the receiving cluster. If clear channel assessment
(CCA) is supported, a node performs collision avoidance (CA)
with a random back o time. If another transmission is detected,
the node aborts the current trial to avoid collisions.
2. At the receiving cluster, if a node has successfully received a single
packet, it starts a back-o time T
ack
before transmitting an ac-
knowledgment. The back-o time is a random variable uniformly
distributed between 0 and a maximum value called T
maxack
. If
in the interval between 0 and T
ack
, it hears an acknowledgment
coming from another node of the same cluster, the node discards
the packet and does not send the acknowledgment.
3. At the transmitting side, if no acknowledgment is received, the
node assumes the packet transmission was not successful and it
multi-casts the packet at the next CSMA-slot again with proba-
bility p. The procedure is repeated until transmission succeeds or
the TDMA-slot ends.
3.4 Mathematical Analysis
In this Section, a mathematical formulation of SERAN in proposed, explain-
ing how access probability and slot duration are determined to satisfy applica-
tion requirements (successful transmission probability and maximum delay),
and to optimize for power consumption.
Recalling k the number of packets that the cluster has to evacuate at the
beginning of a transmitting TDMA-slot, we consider the worst case scenario
for collisions, when the k packets are distributed over k dierent nodes.
According to the p-persistent slotted CSMA scheme, a node successfully
transmits a packet in the rst CSMA-slot if the node accesses the channel and
get it clean, while all other nodes in the same situation sense its transmission
and abort the attempt. The channel can be modelled as a Bernoulli variable
with parameter c.
In paper [2], a simplied analysis is presented. It is assumed that, when
more than one node accesses the channel, nobody listens to the other trans-
missions and all packets are lost. This is comparable to a classical slotted
ALOHA system and derive an upper bound for the packet loss probabil-
ity due to the channel access. Under these assumptions, the probability of
having a successful transmission at the rst CSMA-slot is given by:
P
k
= ckp(1 p)
k1
(3.2)
while its ones complement P
k
= 1ckp(1p)
k1
represents the probability
to have again k packets to transmit in the next CSMA-slot.
Once a transmission succeeds, the cluster has K 1 packets to forward.
Hence, the probability of successful transmission in the following CSMA-slot
is P
k1
= c(k 1)p(1 p)
(k2)
. This allows representing the cluster behavior
as a Discrete Time Markov Chain (DTMC), where the state is the number
of nodes that still need to forward a packet (Fig. 3.3). The state 0 is the
steady state solution of the chain.
According to the CSMA fashion, a lower bound for the packet loss prob-
ability can be found considering that all nodes are able to sense ongoing
Figure 3.3: Markov Chain
transmissions avoiding to access and to collide. With this hypothesis the
probability of successful transmission can be associated to the probability to
have at least one node attempting to transmit the packet. Hence,
P
k
= c[1 (1 p)
k
] (3.3)
Depending on the implementation of the CSMA and network parameters
(e.g. network size), the real performance lays between these two bounds.
Possible failures in the sensing procedure can happen when two sens-
ing procedures are simultaneous or a node start a transmission between the
posting and the execution of a sending task of another node. To take into
account possible collisions between packets we can consider the latter derived
expression, introducing a factor , that represents the probability of a wrong
sensing when two nodes are involved.
P
k
= c[1 (1 p)
k
](1 )
[p(k1)]
(3.4)
Considering a transmitting node, p(k 1) indicates the expected number
of additional accesses to the channel in the same CSMA-slot.
Introducing a CSMA/CA mechanism, the parameter is much closer to
1 and the approximation with the lower bound is satisfactory.
3.4.1 Absorption Time
In this section we determine the expected time (in number of steps) to reach
the absorbing state starting from a given state between 1 and k. This is
equivalent to determining the average number of CSMA-slots required for
forwarding a number of packets between 1 and k.
Since expectation is a linear operator and considering that the chain can
advance only one step at a time, the expected time to absorption starting
from a state k is equivalent to the sum of the expected time to transition
from state k to state (k 1) plus the expected time to transition from state
(k 1) to (k 2) and so on until state 0 is reached. The distribution of the
required steps in the transition from the state j to the state j 1 is geometric
of parameter (1 P
j
). Consequently, the expected time to transition from
state j to state (j 1) is bounded by:
(j) =
1
P
j
=
1
cjp(1 p)
j1
(3.5)
The expected number of steps to reach the absorption starting from state k
is:
k
=
k
j=1
(j) =
k
j=1
1
cjp(1 p)
j1
(3.6)
Using Equation 3.4 for P
j
, the expected absorption time is:
k
=
k
j=1
1
c[1 (1 p)
j
](1 )
[p(j1)]
(3.7)
3.4.2 Access Probability
The access probability p is a critical parameter for the protocol performance.
Recalling the Equation 3.6, it can be easily found that, for each transition
from state j to (j 1), the access probability that minimizes the transition
time is
p
j
=
1
j
(3.8)
With this choice, the expected number of transmission attempts for each slot
is exactly one. It maximizes channel utilization keeping a low probability of
collision. A negative aspect is that the channel access probability depends
on the entire networks behavior. It is not easy to implement this choice in
a distributed fashion because nodes may not be aware of the fact that other
nodes completed a successful transmission. Moreover there is no way to tell it
to them without incurring into major overhead costs. A strategy is that each
node automatically updates its access probability evaluating the expected
time to complete a transition in the chain, but it is heavy to compute. A
simpler and useful choice is to x a constant value that remains the same
during the whole TDMA-slot duration for each node.
It is possible to show that nding a closed form expression for p that
minimizes
k
in Equation 3.6 is a non-trivial problem [4].
In paper [2], Bonivento et al. propose a suboptimal choice, xing the access
probability
p =
1
k
(3.9)
for the whole duration of the slot, which is not optimal for the expected
forwarding time, but it ensures that at the beginning of the TDMA-slot
the expected number of transmission attempts for each CSMA-slot is one.
Initially the channel is high utilized, while as the time advances, it will be
less and less utilized.
The expressions of the absorption time become:
k
=
k
c
k
j=1
1
j
_
1
1
k
_
j1
(3.10)
and
k
=
k
j=1
1
c
_
1
_
1
1
k
_
j
_
(1 )
[
(j1)
k
]
(3.11)
A closed form solution for
k
is not easy to calculate, but some useful
upper and lower bounds are proved in reference [2]. In particular an upper
bound for both of the expressions is:
k
k ln(k) (3.12)
where is a constant.
Fig.3.4 reports a comparison between the expected absorption time against
the number of packets k obtained from Equation 3.6 and the upper bound
in Equation 3.12. Even if the upper bound is much higher than the real
expected time, it will be useful in Section 3.4.4 to establish relations with
other protocol parameters.
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
Number of forwarding packets (k)
N
u
m
b
e
r

o
f

C
S
M
A
-
s
l
o
t
s

p
e
r

T
D
M
A
-
s
l
o
t
Expected Forwarding Time for Fixed Access Probability
Upper Bound
Exact Values
Figure 3.4: Expected forwarding time in number of CSMA-slot for p = 1/k
3.4.3 Scheduling Policy
The scheduling policy must consider the dierent trac intensity in the net-
work; in general it is opportune to evacuate the clusters close to the Controller
rst, to minimize the storage requirement in the network.
The organization of the TDMA-cycle has to refer to the same considera-
tion. For instance, clusters closer to the Controller experience more trac
intensity and so more than one transmitting TDMA-slot can be assigned
to them. Assuming the same average trac for every cluster and referring
again to the scenario in Fig. 3.1, a good scheduling policy would be to assign
one transmitting TDMA-slot per TDMA-cycle to cluster 1, two transmitting
TDMA-slots to cluster 2 and three transmitting TDMA-slots to cluster 4; in
the same way in the other path one and two TDMA-slots allocated respec-
tively for cluster 3 and 5.
The number of TDMA-slots in a TDMA-cycle is 9. A suitable scheduling
table for such a policy is presented in Fig. 3.5.
In the general case, assuming P paths in the network and calling B
i
the
number of cluster in the i
th
path, the number of TDMA-slots in a TDMA-
Figure 3.5: Example of Scheduling Table
cycle is:
T
f
=
1
2
P
i=1
B
i
(B
i
+ 1) (3.13)
3.4.4 Sustainable Trac
Because of the interleaved schedule, each cluster evacuates all the locally
generated packets before receiving packets to forward.
It is necessary to ensure that the expected time for the evacuation of all the
packets in a cluster is less then or equal to the duration of a TDMA-slot. If it
does not happen, packets can not be disposed with catastrophic consequences
on performance [4].
Consider:
S: duration of a TDMA-slot,
: duration of a TDMA-cycle,
: packet generation rate for each cluster
the number of generated packet during a TDMA-slot is:
k = (3.14)
Using the upper bound of the evacuation time presented in Equation 3.12,
the condition on the sustainable trac can be expressed as:
S ln() (3.15)
Recalling = ST
f
Equation 3.15 can be simplied in:
S S
max,s
=
exp(T
f
)
1
T
f
(3.16)
Hence, the TDMA-slot duration S is upper bounded, depending on the topol-
ogy (through T
f
) and the packet generation rate .
Rewriting Equation 3.15, we can nd an expression in terms of maximum
sustainable trac
max
for the network, once xed the topology and the
TDMA-slot duration:
max
ln(
max
ST
f
) =
1
T
f
(3.17)
3.5 Energy Consumption
The total energy consumed by the network over a period of time is the
combination of ve components:
energy spent for sensing the channel
energy spent during the transmission stage
energy spent to listen during the listening TDMA-slots
energy spent during the receptions stage
energy spent for the collision avoidance procedure if it is supported
For a simplied analysis, the energy consumption for receiving can be con-
sidered together with the consumption for listening, while the contributes
for sensing the channel and avoiding collision together with the energy for
transmission.
Listening Cost E
ls
Given a listening time t, the energy consumption is the sum of two costs:
a xed wake up cost R,
the listening cost W.
Therefore, the listening cost is:
E
ls
(t) = R +Wt (3.18)
Now it is important to determine the number of wake-ups and the duration
of the listening time during a TDMA-cycle.
Considering the reference topology, the number of wake-ups is 4. In fact,
nodes in cluster 1 and 3 never wake up for listening, nodes in cluster 2 and
5 wake up once and nodes in cluster 4 wake up twice.
Referring to a general topology with N nodes per cluster and assuming that
all nodes wake up in their listening slot, the total number of wake-ups N
wu
during a TDMA-cycle is:
N
wu
=
N
2
P
i=1
B
i
(B
i
1) (3.19)
Once awake, a node can keep on listening for at most the entire TDMA-
slot duration S.
The total listening cost in a time T can be expressed by:
E
ls
=
T
N
wu
N [R +WS] (3.20)
Transmitting Cost E
tx
The energy consumption for transmissions has two components:
packet transmission cost E
pkt
,
acknowledgement transmission cost E
ack
.
The global contribute depends on the average number of attempted trans-
missions during a TDMA-cycle.
For a transition from a state j to the state j 1 the number of attempted
transmissions N(j) is the average number of nodes attempting to transmit
in a CSMA-slot multiplied by the average number of slots required for the
transition.
N(j) = pj
1
cpj(1 p)
(j1)
(3.21)
During a TDMA-cycle the average number of attempted packet transmissions
is:
N
pkt
= T
f
k
j=1
1
c(1 p)
(j1)
(3.22)
Since p = 1/k, Equation 3.22 can be simplied as:
N
pkt
= T
f
k 1
c
_
_
1
1
k
_
k
1
_
(3.23)
For high values of k,
_
1
1
k
_
k
1 (e 1)
(k 1) k
the expected number of attempted transmission is a linear function of the
number of packets to transmit. Considering the relation k = :
N
pkt

T
f
c
(e 1) = T
f
A (3.24)
The constant A =
(e1)
c
denote the average number of attempted transmis-
sions for a single packet in a TDMA-slot.
The number of acknowledgement transmissions is linked to the number
of transmitted packets by:
N
ack
= T
f
(3.25)
Consequently, the transmitting cost in a time T is:
E
tx
=
T
[N
pkt
E
pkt
+N
ack
E
ack
] = T T
f
[AE
pkt
+E
ack
] (3.26)
Including a CA mechanism, the expression is slightly dierent. The actual
number of attempted transmissions is reduced and it can be approximated
by the number of successful transmissions:
N
tx,ca
T
f
(3.27)
The cost for collision avoidance is:
E
ca
= N
ca
(R +Wt) (3.28)
N
ca
and t are the number and the duration of clear channel assessments.
Considering a simplied model, the number of channel assessments is:
N
ca
= A
ca
(3.29)
Total Energy Cost
The total consumption in a time T with access probability p = 1/k can
be expressed by:
E
tot
=
T
[N
pkt
E
pkt
+N
ack
E
ack
+N
wu
N(R +WS)] =
= T [AE
pkt
+T
f
E
ack
] +
T
T
f
N
wu
_
R
S
+W
_
(3.30)
and with CSMA/CA:
E
tot,ca
=
T
[N
pkt
E
pkt
+N
ack
E
ack
+N
ca
N(R +Wt) +N
wu
N(R +WS)] =
= T[AE
pkt
+T
f
E
ack
+A
ca
(R +Wt)] +
T
T
f
N
wu
_
R
S
+W
_
(3.31)
where E
pkt
, E
ack
, R and W are parameters that characterize the phys-
ical layer, is given by the application, T
f
and N depend on the network
topology, so, the only protocol parameter in Equation 3.30 and 3.31 is S.
Moreover, E
tot
(S) is a monotonically decreasing function of S. Hence, the
problem of minimization of the energy consumption can be viewed as a prob-
lem of maximization of the TDMA-slot duration.
3.6 Latency Requirement
The clusters that experience the highest delay are the furthest from the
Controller. The aim is to have the delay of packets coming from those clusters
less than or equal to a given D
max
, the requirement set by the application.
In this model we consider a time-driven data reporting method (see Sec-
tion 2.4). A packet is generated only when a node wakes up in its transmitting
TDMA-slot.
The idea of a uniform distribution of the generating packet rate inside a
TDMA-cycle does not t with the assumed scheduling policy (Section 3.4.3).
In fact, in prexed slots a node is in sleeping state and the sensing function-
ality is assumed to be turned o. The application requirement in terms of
packet generating rate is kept constant not in a single TDMA-cycle but in a
longer term temporal average.
Considering a packet generated from cluster 1, with the discussed scheduling
policy the worst case of delay is when it is generated at the beginning of the
transmitting TDMA-slot and cluster 4 forwards it to the Controller at the
end of its own transmitting TDMA-slot, that is 3S.
Generalizing to the case of P path with B
i
clusters per path and dening
B = max
1..P
B
i
(3.32)
the worst case delay is:
D = BS (3.33)
Consequently, the requirement on the TDMA-slot duration S is:
S S
max,d
=
D
max
B
(3.34)
If during a TDMA-slot not all the packets are forwarded, latency over the
deadline is observed. It can be useful to model this phenomenon of outage
referring to the Discrete Time Markov Chain (DTMC) presented in Section
3.4.
Using the Central Limit Theorem, the distribution of the time to forward
packets is a normal variable whose mean and variance is given by the
sum of the expected times and variances to advance a step in the chain.
Let
ev
be the time to evacuate packets and m
ev
and var
ev
its mean and
variance. Consequently,
ev
can be modelled as
ev
N(m
ev
,
2
ev
). In case
there is no carrier sense and collision avoidance:
m
ev
=
j=1
1
cpj(1 p)
j1
(3.35)
2
ev
=
j=1
cpj(1 p)
j1
[1 cpj(1 p)
j1
]
2
(3.36)
while in the general case:
m
ev
=
j=1
1
c[1 (1 p)
j
](1 )
[p(j1)]
(3.37)
2
ev
=
j=1
c[1 (1 p)
j
](1 )
[p(j1)]
[1 c[1 (1 p)
j
](1 )
[p(j1)]
]
2
(3.38)
Consequently, the probability of outage in a given TDMA-slot can be
approximated by:
P
r
[
ev
S]
1
2
erfc
_
S m
ev
_
2
ev
_
(3.39)
where erfc() is the complementary error function dened as:
erfc(x) =
2
_

x
e
t
2
dt (3.40)
3.7 Error Rate Requirement
In the following a method to establish the constraint PRR PRR
min
is
discussed.
3.7.1 Problem Formulation
The reference model is the same Discrete Time Markov Chain (DTMC) pre-
sented in Section 3.4, where the state is the number of packets that still need
to be forwarded.
We recall the parameters:
S: TDMA-slot duration (in number of CSMA-slots)
k: number of packets to send in the cluster
P
n
: probability of transition from the state n to the state n 1
P
n
denotes the probability of successful transmission when there are n packets
to transmit.
We dene P(n, S, k) the probability to be in the state n after a number S
of steps in the DTMC. In other words, P(n, S, k) represents the probability
of losing n of k packets. If there are still n packets left after S CSMA-slots,
this packets are discarded.
Consequently, the PRR can be written as:
PRR =
k
n=0
P(n, S, k)w(n) (3.41)
where
w(n) =
k n
k
3.7.2 P(n,S,k) Evaluation
It is hard to evaluate easily P(n, S, k) for a TDMA/CSMA with ACK and
retransmission.
We can consider a specic example to understand a general law. Let k
be 3 and S equal to 4, we can try to determinate P(1, 4, 3). The associated
Markov Chain is in Figure 3.6.
Figure 3.6: Markov Chain for n = 1, S = 4, k = 3
P(1, 4, 3) is given by the sum of the probabilities of all the possible paths
that start from the state 3 and end in 1, in exactly 4 steps. So:
P(1, 4, 3) = P
2
P
3
[P
1
P
1
+P
2
P
2
+P
3
P
3
+P
1
P
2
+P
1
P
3
+P
2
P
3
] (3.42)
The product P
2
P
3
is present in all the paths, while, inside the brackets, there
are all the combinations with repetition of the elements P
1
, P
2
, P
3
, taken 2
at a time.
It is possible to generalize this approach, dening a set
V (n) = {P
n
, P
n+1
, ..., P
k
} (3.43)
and a matrix that contains all the N
c
combinations with repetition of the
elements in V (n), taken in groups of n +S k.
A(n) = [a
h,j
]
Sk+n
Nc
(3.44)
In the previous example,
V (1) = {P
1
, P
2
, P
3
} (3.45)
A(1) =
_
_
P
1
P
1
P
2
P
2
P
3
P
3
P
1
P
2
P
1
P
3
P
2
P
3
_
_
The general expression for P(n, S, k) is given by:
P(n, S, k) =
k
m=n+1
P
m
_
_
Nc
j=1
(Sk)+n
h=i
a
h,j
_
_
(3.46)
3.7.3 Packet Reception Rate
Implementing Equations 3.41 and 3.7.3 in Matlab, it is possible to evalu-
ate the PRR of SERAN protocol, and to obtain bounds for the protocol
parameters.
We implement the simplied model for P
n
, using the expression:
P
n
= cnp(1 p)
n1
(3.47)
As already said this gives us a worst case scenario for the CSMA, but the
analysis holds for the other models as well.
The Fig. 3.7 represents the PRR as function of S, varying the number of
packets k.
In Fig. 3.8, the relation between the number of packets K and the value
of S that gives a xed PRR is presented. For instance, it shows that 3 packets
require a TDMA-slot of about 12 CSMA-slots, to guarantee PRR = 95%,
10 slots for PRR = 90% and 8 slots for PRR = 85%.
The computation for the Equation with high values of k is heavy and long.
Hence, the Fig. 3.7 and 3.8 can not be easily drawn for k > 10. On the other
side, the relation between S and k for xed PRR is almost linear and the
behavior for k > 10 can be estimated.
An upper bound for the PRR can be determined in a CSMA scenario
with perfect collision avoidance, where:
P
k
= c[1 (1 p)
k
] (3.48)
In Fig. 3.9, a comparison between upper and lower bound is shown for k = 3.
These results will be validated in Section 5.2.
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
(S-K)
P
R
R
K=2
K=3
K=4
K=5
K=6
Figure 3.7: PRR vs.(S k), for dierent values of k
2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5 6 6.5 7
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
K
S
PRR=95%
PRR=90%
PRR=85%
Figure 3.8: S vs.k, for xed values of PRR
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18
0.5
0.55
0.6
0.65
0.7
0.75
0.8
0.85
0.9
0.95
1
S-K
P
R
R
PRR vs (S-K) for K=3
Upper Bound
Lower Bound
Figure 3.9: PRR vs.(S k), for k = 3 - upper and lower bounds
3.8 Optimization Problem
Once established mathematical relations in terms of energy cost function,
latency and error rate requirements, it is possible to dene the choice of the
parameters that optimize the performance of SERAN. We recall the reference
problem:
minimize E
tot
subject to PRR PRR
min
D D
max
(3.49)
In Appendix A, we report the complete list of parameters in the proto-
col. Here, we recall the parameters that are directly inuenced by MAC &
Routing layers of SERAN:
access probability p,
TDMA-slot duration S.
The optimization algorithm works in two phases: an o-line and an on-
line optimization.
O-line optimization
According to the analysis in Section 3.4.2, an appropriate choice of the access
probability is:
p =
1
k
(3.50)
where k is the average number of packets that a cluster sends in a TDMA-
slot. Recalling k = , and = ST
f
, we have:
p =
1
S T
f
(3.51)
The only variable is S.
From Section 3.5, it is known that the energy cost is a monotonically
decreasing function of S. Without considering any application constraint,
S can be increased until it reaches the maximum sustainable trac S
max,s
derived in Section 3.4.4.
As shown in Section 3.6, the maximum delay requirement D
max
provides
an upper bound for S, given by: S
max,d
=
Dmax
B
Hence, we will x:
S = min{S
max,s
, S
max,d
} (3.52)
This choice has to be compared with the error rate requirement, consid-
ering the analysis in Section 3.7. If the value of S is in compliance with the
constraints, it is xed as initial TDMA-slot duration.
On-line optimization
The network starts operating with the selected optimal parameters. Real-
time, the Controller determines the actual values of packet delay and error
rate and modies the value of S, to enhance the performance. There are
various possible situations:
1. The measured delay can be lower than the worst-case scenario used for
the initial optimization. In this case, if the error rate constraint allows
it, the protocol is entitled to increase the TDMA-slot duration.
2. The delay is on the boundary, but PRR can be higher than the min-
imum threshold. However, S can be slightly increased and the gen-
erated lost packets rate due to the overtaken delay constraint, can be
supported by the network.
Chapter 4
Protocol Implementation
In this chapter, we introduce the hardware and software technologies used to
implement the WSN test-bed environment. We report some implementation
tricks and procedure to guarantee the correct behavior of SERAN protocol
and also diculties and drawbacks. Eventually, we describe a specic model
to evaluate the network lifetime for the presented platform.
4.1 Hardware Technologies
A sensor network is an embedded system, or rather a digital system com-
mitted to specic duties. Each node consists of a sensor board and a
programming board [8]. The sensor board could be dierentiated by the
specic kind of sensor: light, temperature, humidity, but also distance track-
ing or GPS receiver. The programming board supplies wireless communica-
tion capabilities between nodes or wired between a node and a base station
(PC). The benchmark is the IEEE 802.15.4 radio standard, with low data
rate (around 250 kbps). A node is equipped with a microcontroller (8-16 bit)
and low storage memories.
4.1.1 Tmote Sky platform
Tmote Sky is a node platform for low power and high data-rate sensor net-
work applications designed with the dual goal of fault tolerance and devel-
opment ease [29]. Designed at the University of California, Berkeley, it is
the successor of the popular TelosA and TelosB research platforms. The
Tmote Sky platform oers vertical integration between the hardware and
43
CHAPTER 4. PROTOCOL IMPLEMENTATION 44
the TinyOS operating system. The Tmote Sky module has integrated sen-
sors, radio, antenna, microcontroller and programming capabilities. The low
power operation of the module is due to the low power TI MSP430 micro-
controller. This 16-bit RISC processor features low active and sleep current
consumption. In order to minimize power consumption, the processor in
sleep mode during majority of the time, wakes up as fast as possible to pro-
cess, then returns to sleep mode again. Tmote Sky provides an easy-to-use
USB protocol from FTDI to communicate with the host computer for pro-
gramming, debugging and data collection. It features the Chipcon CC2420
radio for reliable wireless communications [32], which is high congurable for
many applications with the default radio setting providing IEEE 802.15.4
[22] compliance. The radio provides fast data rate and robust signal. It
is controlled by the microcontroller through the SPI port and can be shut
o for low power duty cycled operation. Tmote Skys internal antenna is
an Inverted-F microstrip design, with a pseudo omnidirectional pattern that
may attain 50 meter range indoors and up to 125 meter range outdoors.
The picture in Fig. 4.1 shows a Tmote Sky platform, compared in size with
a Swedish coin.
Figure 4.1: Tmote Sky platform
4.2 Software Technologies
The link between hardware platform and software equipment is stricter than
the other technologies, because of the particular resource constraints (e.g.
low power consumption, reduced memory). It follows the demand of specic
ad hoc software technologies. Hence, operating systems for WSN nodes are
typically less complex than general-purpose operating systems. In general
operating systems in WSNs should fulll these requirements:
Robustness: once deployed, a sensor network must work unattended
for months or years;
Low resource usage: sensor network nodes include very small RAM,
and run o batteries;
Multiple service implementation: applications should be able to
choose between various implementations;
Adaptability to evolutions: mote hardware is in constant evolu-
tion; applications and most system services must be portable across
hardware generations;
Adaptability to application requirements: applications have very
dierent requirements in terms of lifetime, communication, sensing, etc.
On the other side, they do not require interactivity in the same way as
applications for PCs and the operating system does not need to include
support for user interfaces.
4.2.1 TinyOS
TinyOS is an embedded operating system expressly designed for WSNs. The
basic concepts behind TinyOS are:
application compiled and used for programming a single node.
Hurry Up and Sleep Philosophy; so when a node wakes up for an event,
it has to execute the associated action as fast as possible, then go back
to sleep.
Because of the extremely limited resources of the hardware platforms, it
is dicult to virtualize system operation to create the kinds of system ab-
stractions that are available in more resource rich systems. The concurrency
model and abstractions provided by operating system therefore signicantly
impact the design and development process.
The TinyOS 2.x family is the latest stable branch of the operating sys-
tem and is used in this section to describe the basic design principles. The
TinyOS development environment directly supports a variety of device pro-
grammers and permits programming each device with a unique address at-
tribute without having to compile the source code each time. The TinyOS
system, libraries and applications are written in nesC, a version of C that
was designed for programming embedded systems.
The characteristics of TinyOS 2.x are listed as [24]:
Resource constrained concurrency
Concurrency is the main important software challenge. The system
manages several components, as sensors, ADCs, radio and ash mem-
ory. Generally, an operation is started on a device, which runs concur-
rently with the main processor until generating a response. Meanwhile,
other devices may also need service, requiring the system to manage
several event streams. A conventional OS uses multiple threads, each
with its own stack. The thread dedicated to a device issues a command
and then sleeps or polls until the operation completes. The OS switches
among threads by saving and restoring their registers, and threads co-
ordinate with others by using shared variables as ags and semaphores.
This is problematic for embedded designs because multiple stacks must
be kept in memory and each thread can potentially interact with any
other whenever it accesses a shared variable. This can lead to dead-
locks, requiring complex schedulers to meet real-time requirements and
deadlines. TinyOS attacks the problem by oering dierent levels of
concurrency, in a structured event-driven execution.
Structured event-driven execution
TinyOS provides a structured event-driven model. A complete system
conguration is formed by wiring together a set of components for
a target platform and application domain. Components are restricted
objects with well-dened interfaces, internal state, and internal con-
currency. Primitive components encapsulate hardware elements (radio,
ADC, timer, bus ...). Their interface reects the hardware operations
and interrupts; the state and concurrency is that of the physical de-
vice. Higher-level components encapsulate software functionality, but
with a similar abstraction. They provide commands, signal events,
and have internal handlers, task threads, and state variables. This
approach accommodates hardware evolution, including major changes
in the hardware/software boundary, by component replacements. Its
memory footprint is small, despite supporting extensive concurrency,
requiring only a single stack and a small task queue. However, the
modular construction provides exibility, robustness, and ease of pro-
gramming. A restricted form of thread, called a task, is available within
each component, but interactions across components are through ex-
plicit command/event interfaces. The wiring of components and the
higher priority of asynchronous events over tasks permit the use of
simple schedulers, and in TinyOS 2.0 even the scheduler is replaceable.
Components and bidirectional interfaces
TinyOS supports component composition, system-wide analysis, and
network data types. A component has a set of bidirectional command
and event interfaces implemented either directly or by wiring a collec-
tion of subcomponents. The compiler optimizes the entire hierarchi-
cal graph, validates that it is free of race conditions and deadlocks,
and sizes resources. The TinyOS community has developed plug-ins
for integrated solutions and several visual programming environments
for this component-based programming style. Network data types sim-
plify protocol implementation. While network packets have a particular
specied format, data representation in a computer program depends
on word width and addressing of the host processor, so most protocol
code contains machine-dependent bit-twiddling and run-time parsing.
Because TinyOS uses network types with a completely specied rep-
resentation, the compiler provides ecient access to packet elds on
embedded nodes, as well as Java and XML methods for packet han-
dling on conventional computers and gateways.
Split-phase operations
Split-phase operations are a typical use of bidirectional interfaces. Tiny-
OS has a non-preemptive nature and does not support blocking opera-
tions. This means that all long-latency operations have to be realized
in a split-phase fashion, by separating the operation-request and the
signaling of the completion. The client component requests the execu-
tion of an operation using command calls which execute a command
handler in the server component. The server component signals the
completion of the operation by calling an event handler in the client
component. In this way, each component involved in the interaction is
responsible for implementing part of the split-phase operation.
Sensing
TinyOS 2.0 provides sensor drivers, which scale from low-rate, low-
power sampling of environmental factors to high-rate, low-jitter sam-
pling of vibration or acceleration. Drivers handle warm-up, acquisition,
arbitration, and interface specics. Since sensor selection is closely tied
to the application and mechanical design, drivers must be easily con-
gured and tested, rather than dynamically loaded after market.
Communication and networking
Communications and networking have driven the TinyOS design as
available radios and microcontroller interfaces evolved. The commu-
nication subsystem has to meet real-time requirements and respond
to asynchronous events while other devices and processes are serviced.
The TinyOS 2.0 radio component provides a uniform interface to the
full capabilities of the radio chip. The link-level component provides
rich media access control (MAC) capabilities, including channel activ-
ity detection, collision avoidance, data transfer, scheduling, and power
management, allowing networking components to optimize for specic
protocols. The TinyOS community has developed networking layers
targeted at dierent applications with dierent techniques for discov-
ery, routing, power reduction, reliability, and congestion control. These
networking layers provide higher-level communication services to em-
bedded applications with a TinyOS programming interface. The most
widely used services for WSNs are reliable dissemination, aggregate
data collection, and directed routing. To collect and aggregate data
from the WSN, nodes cooperate in building and maintaining one or
more collection trees, rooted at a gateway or data sink. Each node
gathers link-quality statistics and routing cost estimates through all
kinds of communication, including routing beacons, packet forwarding,
and passive trac monitoring.
Storage
Nonvolatile storage is used in WSNs for logging, conguration parame-
ters, les, and program images. Several dierent kinds of Flash memory
are used with dierent interfaces and dierent protocols. Lower-layer
TinyOS components provide a block storage abstraction for various
Flash chips and platform congurations, with one or more application-
level data services provided on this substrate.
4.3 Time Synchronization and Network Ini-
tialization
Time synchronization is a critical issue in distributed WSN. The TDMA-
based MAC component of SERAN imposes a strict synchronization between
clusters, while the slotted CSMA component requires robustness against
clock drift between nodes inside a cluster.
4.3.1 Token Passing Procedure
SERAN implements a token passing procedure that:
ensures synchronization between nodes and clusters;
allows initializing and self conguring to the optimal working point;
allows for the addition of new nodes.
A token is a particular message that carries the information on the duration
of a TDMA-slot and a TDMA-cycle, the transmitting and receiving schedule
of a TDMA-cycle, a synchronization message carrying the current execution
state of the TDMA-cycle.
The Controller has all the information to calculate the optimal set of param-
eters, consequently, it is able to generate a token before the network starts
operating. The network initialization algorithm works as follows:
1. When the network starts, all nodes are awake and listening. Nodes
remain in this state and cannot transmit before receiving the token.
2. The Controller multi-casts the token to all nodes of one of the connected
clusters. In general this is the rst in the scheduling table. In the
reference example (Fig. 3.1), assume the selected cluster is the cluster
4.
3. Nodes of the selected cluster read the information on scheduling and du-
ration of TDMA-slot and TDMA-cycle. Moreover, each node acquires
the information about the global time and launches periodic timers for
CSMA and TDMA slots. In the meantime, a random back-o timer
starts for each node before sending an acknowledgement.
4. The rst node that expires the back-o time sends the acknowledge-
ment to the Controller and becomes the token forwarder. Then, all
nodes in the cluster go to sleep.
5. At the beginning of the second TDMA-slot the token forwarder wakes
up and immediately multi-casts the token to all nodes in the next clus-
ter (i.e. cluster 2).
6. With the same random acknowledgement-based scheme, a node is elected
token forwarder for nodes in the following cluster (i.e. cluster 1).
7. After the rst branch of the routing tree is explored, the Controller
sends a token to cluster 5, the new branch is explored, and so on.
Information about routing and TDMA-slot duration needs also to be
updated during the network operation. Hence, the Controller periodically
performs a token refreshing procedure. It is a critical phase because the
Controller needs to ensure that all nodes in the network receive the new
token. First, all nodes should be in listening state and, moreover, when the
token is forwarded along the network, the scheduled packet transmission has
to be interrupted, to avoid collisions.
If the frequency of token refreshing is high, the response of the proto-
col to variation in the surrounding conditions is faster and the adaptability
increases. On the other side, the procedure is costly in terms of energy con-
sumption. In our implementation, we do not consider strict requirements
on the protocol adaptability, while the minimum energy consumption is fun-
damental. We think that a suitable choice of the refreshing period is 20
TDMA-cycles.
Nodes are informed by the Controller about the refreshing period through
the rst token passing. We can also suppose that the Controller can mod-
ify this value and update it during each token refreshing, according to the
network behavior.
4.4 MAC/Routing Implementation
SERAN MAC and Routing protocols are introduced in Section ??. Here, we
discuss some details referred to the specic implementation in TinyOS 2.x on
Tmote Sky motes. In Fig. 4.2 we present a useful ow diagram, describing
the node activities in transmission and reception.
Carrier Sense Carrier Sense
Broadcasng Broadcasng
the Packet the Packet
Waing for ACK Waing for ACK
Back Back- -o o
Time Time
Is it free? Is it free?
Y N
Is it free? Is it free?
Y N
Listening Listening
Back Back- -o Time o Time
Any Packet Any Packet
Received? Received?
Y N
Has anybody Has anybody
sent ACK? sent ACK?
Y N
Discarding Discarding
Packet Packet
Sending Sending
ACK ACK
Listening Listening
Back Back- -o Time o Time
Received? Received?
Y N
Received? Received?
Y N
sent ACK? sent ACK?
Y N
sent ACK? sent ACK?
Y N
Discarding Discarding
Packet Packet
Sending Sending
ACK ACK
Figure 4.2: Flow diagram of SERAN Protocol: transmission side (left) and
receiving side (right)
We adapted the SERAN protocol stack to the CC2420 Radio stack layers
implemented in TinyOS 2.x (TEP 126 of Ref. [30]) and reported in Fig. 4.3:
ActiveMessageP: This is the highest layer in the stack, responsible for
lling in details in the packet header and providing information about
the packet to the application level.
UniqueSend: This layer generates a unique Data Sequence Number
(DSN) byte for the packet header. This byte is incremented once per
outgoing packet, starting with a pseudo-randomly generated number.
A receiver can detect duplicate packets by comparing the source and
DSN byte of a received packet with previous packets. DSN is dened
in the 802.15.4 specication [31].
PacketLink: This layer provides automatic retransmission functionality
and is responsible for retrying a packet transmission if no acknowledge-
ment was heard from the receiver.
CC2420AckLplP / CC2420NoAckLplP: These layers provide asynchronous
low power listening implementations. AckLplP implementation sup-
ports acknowledgement gaps during the preamble. The NoAckLplP
implementation does not support it.
UniqueReceive: This layer maintains a history of the source address
and DSN byte of the past few packets it has received, and helps lter
out duplicate received packets.
TinyosNetworkC: This layer allows the TinyOS 2.x radio stack to inter-
operate with other non-TinyOS networks.
CsmaC: This layer is responsible for dening 802.15.4 FCF byte infor-
mation in the outbound packet, providing default back-o times when
the radio detects a channel in use, and dening the power-up/power-
down procedure for the radio.
TransmitP/ReceiveP: These layers are responsible for interacting di-
rectly with the radio through the SPI bus, interrupts, and GPIO lines.
The main part of SERAN code belongs to the Application Layer of the
stack, but some parts are mixed with the other layers. Awake and sleeping
states are governed by the SplitControl interface. It is used for switching
between the on and o power states of the component providing it, with
the functions start() and stop(). The implementation of the SplitControl
interface is dened in the CC2420CsmaP component.
The TDMA and CSMA slotted structure is realized with the instances
of the TinyOS 2.x TimerMilliC component, wired to the interface Timer <
Tmilli > that provides a set of commands to handle periodic events. It
ensures a precision in order of milliseconds.
Application Layer
Active Message Layer
Unique Send Layer
Packet Link Layer (optional)
Low Power Listening (opt)
Unique Receive Filtering Layer
CSMA
SPI bus, GPIO, Interrupt, Timer
ReceiveP
6LowPAN Network Layer (opt)
TransmitP
Figure 4.3: Architectural layers of CC2420 Radio stack
Back-o timers at MAC layer are managed by the TinyOS 2.x interface
Alarm < T32khz, uint32
t
>, with a 32 microseconds precision, wiring the
component AlarmMultiplexC.
The random components are achieved by the Random interface, provided
by the RandomC conguration, through the function rand16(), that returns
a 16-bit pseudo-random number. The conguration RandomC maps the
standard number generator to a specic algorithm called multiplicative lin-
ear congruential generator (MLCG) [33]. Once the code is compiled the
sequence of the generated random values is the same for each repetition of
the experiment. To increase the randomness, we combined random numbers
with the current value of one of the running timers, obtained with the func-
tion getNow(). For instance, that procedure is used to generate the channel
access probability p. The interfaces Send and Receive dene commands and
events in transmission and reception of data messages.
4.4.1 Acknowledgement Mechanism
The default MAC code of TinyOS 2.x implements two types of acknowledge-
ments:
Hardware ACK, directly implemented in the transceiver.
Software ACK, described by the specic interface PacketAcknowledge-
ments.
Originally, the CC2420 radio stack only used hardware generated auto ac-
knowledgements provided by the CC2420 chip itself. This led to some issues,
such as false acknowledgements where the radio chip would receive a packet
and acknowledge its reception and the microcontroller would never actually
receive the packet. The current CC2420 stack uses software acknowledge-
ments, which have a higher drop percentage. When used with the Send and
Receive interfaces, dropped acknowledgements are more desirable than false
acknowledgements. Received packets are always acknowledged before being
ltered as a duplicate.
The peculiarity of SERAN acknowledgement mechanism is that a node,
during the random back-o time, should listen to possible ACK transmissions
coming from other nodes, before sending its ACK. The implementation of this
mechanism above the standard Software ACK is very tricky. After various
tests, we decided to implement the acknowledgement mechanism using the
conguration of Send interface, the same of the data packet transmissions.
We measured the minimum back-o granularity in the order of
t
= 2
ms. It means that, if a node decides to send the acknowledgement, the
other nodes in the same cluster require at least 2 milliseconds to receive and
elaborate it, before sending their ACK.
4.5 Network Lifetime
Network lifetime is the time span from the deployment to the instant when
the network is considered nonfunctional [27]. When a network should be
considered nonfunctional is, however, application-specic. For instance, it
can be the instant when the rst sensor dies, a percentage of sensors die, the
network partitions, or the loss of coverage occurs. In this analysis we refer
to the battery lifetime of the sensor nodes in the various clusters.
To achieve a good estimation of the network lifetime, we should refer
to a model for the instantaneous power consumption of the motes. In this
study the platform is represented by Tmote Sky mote, with CC2420 Chipcon
wireless transceiver.
4.5.1 Characterization of the CC2420 Transceiver
The consumption pattern can be determined considering dierent states of
operation. In particular the CC2420 transceiver supports four states [25]:
Shutdown: the chip is completely deactivated and the clock is switched
o. It reacts only to a particular startup strobe.
Idle: the chip can acquire commands and the clock is turned on.
Transmit: chip, clock and radio are turned on in transmitting mode
Receive: chip, clock and radio are turned on in receiving mode.
The data sheet of CC2420 component species typical, maximum and min-
imum current consumption. The state diagram in Fig. 4.4 reports typical
values of current I and transition times.
The average power consumed is P = V I. Considering a voltage supply
V = 3V
1
, the power consumption for each state is evaluated in Table 4.1.
Interesting parameters are the energy per bit E
= P/R, and the average

energy per message E = E
L, where R is the transmission rate of the platform

and L the average length of a message. These parameters are evaluated both
for transmission and reception, as reported in Table 4.2. Notice that for
Tmote Sky is R = 250 kbps and the average length of a message is supposed
L = 30 bytes (equal to 240 bits).
1
equivalent to the voltage of 2 full charged AA batteries
Shutdown
80 nA
TX
17.0 mA
194 us
RX
19.6 mA
@
Ptx = 0 dBm

Idle
396 uA
970 us
194 us
Figure 4.4: State diagram and typical current consumption and transition
times for CC2420 transceiver
Table 4.1: Node power consumption
State Power Consumption
Shutdown 120 nW
Idle 594 W
Transmission 26.1 mW
Reception 29.1 mW
We can easily evaluate an average message transmission time t 940s.
Furthermore, studies in wireless micro-sensor networks has shown that
the transient energy when switching from one mode to another impacts the
total power consumption [25]. The order of magnitude is not signicant but
with a high number of state transitions can not be neglected.
4.5.2 Battery Model
The power consumption analysis is necessary to determine the network dura-
bility. In order to convert the mean power consumed by a protocol into the
lifetime of a node, a battery model needs to be dened. In this work it is
considered the simplied model developed in [26] for alkaline batteries.
Table 4.2: Node energy specication
Operation Energy per bit Energy per message
Tx mode 102 J/bit 24.5 mJ
Rx mode 114 J/bit 27.3 mJ
A single battery has a lifetime T given by:
T =
E
P +P
leak
(years) (4.1)
where E is the total energy in Wh of a battery, P is the average power
consumption and P
leak
is the leakage power, assumed equal to 10% of the
full energy E during one year:
P
leak
=
0.1E
24365
(4.2)
In the specic case of AA LR26 alkaline, E = 3.12Wh.
Hence, T is depending only on P according to the expression:
T =
1
7614P + 0.1
(years) (4.3)
As immediate observation, even with zero power consumption, the model
limits the lifetime of alkaline batteries to ten years.
4.6 Drawbacks
The protocol implementation presents two main drawbacks.
Collisions
Collisions are fundamentally related to failures in the CSMA mechanism. A
collision can happen if two or more nodes listen to the channel at the same
time and nd a clean channel.
Duplicated Packets
There are two main reasons of duplication:
A packet is correctly received but the ACK does not arrive to the
sender (e.g. for bad channel condition). Hence, the sender retransmits
the packet.
A node in the receiving cluster does not hear the ACK transmitted
from another node. Hence, in the receiving cluster more than one node
forwards the same packet.
In conclusion, the presence of collisions and packets duplication depends
on the contention-based MAC and it is a common problem with other cross-
layer solutions.
Chapter 5
Experimental Results
This Chapter describes the experimental setup and some results obtained by
running the SERAN protocol on a real scale test-bed.
5.1 Network Setup
The experiments have been conducted in a test-bed environment, realized
along corridors of the building where the Automatic Control Laboratory is
located
1
(see Fig. 5.1).
The deployment is done in such a way to avoid obstacles between clusters
and inside a cluster, this allows us to reproduce good operative conditions
for the protocol, however, the surrounding space is typical of an indoor ap-
plication.
We reproduced the reference topology as in Fig. 5.2. The clusters are
placed at regular intervals of 5 meters. Each cluster is composed by k = 3
motes, deployed without a specic pattern inside a circle with a 1 meter
radius.
The complete network is composed by 16 T-mote Sky sensor nodes, including
a sink mote, connected to a personal computer acting as Controller.
5.2 Validation
As rst step of the validation, the performance of the network are tested in
terms of PRR, referring to the theoretical analysis proposed in Section 3.7.
1
8
th
oor, Osquldas vag 10, KTH Main Campus, Stockholm
59
CHAPTER 5. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 60
Figure 5.1: Test-bed
The CSMA-slot duration is = 100ms, which we veried to be enough for
the nodes to exchange a packet and randomly contend the acknowledgment
(see also Section 4.4.1).
We evaluated some graphics of the PRR against the TDMA-slot duration
S, taking as reference the upper and lower bound of the probability of suc-
cessful transmission. In Fig 5.3 the comparison between ideal and measured
values is shown for a number of packets k = 3.
As in the theoretical approach, the performance is evaluated only for single
C
1
2
4
3
5
C
1
2
4
3
5
Figure 5.2: Network Topology
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18
0.5
0.55
0.6
0.65
0.7
0.75
0.8
0.85
0.9
0.95
1
S-K
P
R
R
PRR vs (S-K) for K=3
Ideal value (upper bound)
Ideal value (lower bound)
Measured Data
Figure 5.3: Packet Reception Rate vs. TDMA-slot duration for k = 3
hop, considering an average of all the transmissions in the network.
The measured PRR respects the theoretical behavior. Only a slower
attainment of maximum PRR is noticed. This is due to various practical
aspects of implementation, but the main reason is that the ideal model does
not consider the acknowledgements. ACKs introduce problems in terms of
collisions, channel losses and duplicated packet. However, the strength is
that the network is able to achieve PRR values drawn near the 100%.
A second test consists in xing relaxed constraints in terms of PRR and
delay and evaluate the performance of the protocol. We considered a latency
constraint on the maximum end-to-end delay of D = 9s and a low cluster
packet rate of = 1pkt/10sec.
Under these assumptions the o-line optimization gives a TDMA-slot dura-
tion S = 3300ms. The TDMA-cycle is = 29, 7s. Consequently, there is an
average of about 3 packets per TDMA-slot and each slot is composed by 33
CSMA-slots. According to the previous validation this setup should ensure
100% of packets delivered in the single hop.
The Table 5.1 presents the average values of PRR, delay and duty cycle
registered during the experiment.
Table 5.1: Validation: average values of PRR, delay and duty cycle
Cluster TDMA Cluster PRR Average Duty
Rate Slot S Number Delay Cycle
1 99.2 % 7111ms 0.2%
2 99.6 % 3640ms 1.9%
1pkt/10sec 3300ms 3 99.5 % 3560ms 0.2%
4 100 % 148ms 3.3%
5 100 % 139ms 1.9%
Nodes of clusters 4 and 5 have optimal conditions of PRR and minimum
delay. The worst performance in terms of PRR and delay is for cluster 1.
Clusters 2 and 3 show intermediate values. The results indicate that PRR
and delay depends mainly on the distance in number of hops to the Controller
(3 hops for cluster 1, 2 for clusters 2 and 3, 1 for clusters 4 and 5).
Duty cycle is minimum for nodes in clusters 1 and 3, intermediate for
clusters 2 and 5, maximum for cluster 4. According to the scheduling policy
(Section 3.4.3) clusters 1 and 3 wake up for transmissions only once a TDMA-
cycle, clusters 2 and 5 wake up twice for transmissions and once for reception
and cluster 4 has three transmitting and two receiving TDMA-slots. This
means that the duty cycle depends mainly on the number of times a cluster
wakes up for the forwarding procedure. In particular, these results show that
the major component of the duty cycle is the listening and receiving time. A
node in a transmitting TDMA-slot of 3300ms is awake for about only 60ms
( 0.2% of a TDMA-cycle), while in the receiving TDMA-slot it is awake
for an average time of 500ms ( 1.5% of a TDMA-cycle). It points out the
benets of power saving techniques in the receiving cluster. For instance,
in the analyzed cases the number of nodes waking up for listening in the
receiving cluster is equal to the expected number of packet to be transmitted
in a TDMA-slot.
The Fig. 5.4 shows the evolution of the average delay, evaluated for the
dierent distances in number of hops to the Controller. Nodes at the same
distance to the Controller does not experience a big variance around the
average values determined in Table 5.1, but the randomized approach make
the nodes experience independent delays in two consecutive transmissions.
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
8000
9000
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61 64 67
Time (Number of TDMA-cycles)
D
e
l
a
y

(
m
s
)
3 hops
2 hops
1 hop
Figure 5.4: Average Delay, = 1pkt/10s
0
0,5
1
1,5
2
2,5
3
3,5
4
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61 64 67
D
u
t
y

C
y
c
l
e

(
%
)
1 tx slot
2 tx slots
3 tx slots
Figure 5.5: Average Duty Cycle, = 1pkt/10s
6000 6500 7000 7500 8000 8500 9000 9500 10000
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
Delay (ms)
D
is
tr
ib
u
tio
n
Cluster 1
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
Delay (ms)
D
is
tr
ib
u
tio
n
Cluster 4
2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
Delay (ms)
D
is
tr
ib
u
tio
n
Cluster 2
Figure 5.6: Delay distribution for clusters 1, 2 and 4 (3,2 and 1 hops to the
Controller)
In Fig. 5.5 the average duty cycle is presented, considering averaged
representative values for clusters with the same number of assigned TDMA-
slot.
In Fig. 5.6, we show the distribution of the delays respectively for cluster
1, 2 and 4 (located at 3, 2 and 1 hop to the Controller). The furthest cluster
presents a larger variance, due to the multi-hop.
This preliminary phase has been useful to verify the actual operation of
the network and to have an idea of the behavior and the capabilities of the
protocol.
5.3 Performance Analysis
In this Section, we present the results of the experiments with more stressed
constraints, in order to evaluate the real performance and test the robustness
of the protocol.
We considered a latency constraint on the end-to-end delay of: D = 3s
The lower bound for the cumulative PRR is xed to: PRR = 95%. Under
this assumptions, the theoretical optimal value for the TDMA-slot duration
is S = 1100ms. This value allows keeping the maximum delay in the worst
case of communication within the required boundary. For this reason, it is
xed as start-point for the experiment (using o-line optimization).
The Controller initializes the network sending a token with a synchronization
message and the TDMA-cycle schedule. It starts to acquire the actual values
of delay, PRR and duty cycle. Furthermore, it is able to modify the TDMA-
slot duration for an on-line optimization.
The slot duration is updated during the token refreshing procedure that,
in this particular setup, is every 20 cycles. In Table 5.3, the experimental
results are summarized, considering two dierent values of packet rate.
Table 5.2: Performance analysis: average values of PRR, delay and duty
cycle
Cluster TDMA Cluster PRR Average Duty
Rate Slot S Number Delay Cycle
1 86.5 % 2553ms 0.5%
2 94.6 % 1322ms 3.7%
3pkt/10sec 1200ms 3 95.0 % 1355ms 0.5%
4 97.3 % 43ms 6.1%
5 97.0 % 38ms 3.6%
1 99.3 % 2719ms 0.4%
2 99.7 % 1411ms 2.3%
1pkt/5sec 1300ms 3 99.6 % 1401ms 0.4%
4 100 % 66ms 4.1%
5 100 % 59ms 2.3%
In both cases, the protocol increases the duration of the TDMA-slot due
to the computed end-to-end delay values that do not reach the worst case
level in the normal execution. It enhances the performance of the network
both in terms of PRR and duty cycle.
In the case = 1pkt/5sec, the optimal TDMA-slot is greater, and the la-
tency constraint sometimes is not satised because of the better performance
evaluated in terms of PRR. It allows accepting that some packets could be
lost due to the end-to-end delay bound.
The Fig. 5.7 show the evolution of the average delay during the exper-
iment, evaluated for the dierent distances in number of hops to the Con-
troller. In Fig. 5.8 the average duty cycle is presented. As intuitively clear,
the reference clusters for the end-to-end delay and PRR are the farthest from
the Controller. However these clusters are also the less loaded in terms of
trac and have very low energy consumption. Otherwise the closest clusters
present higher average node duty cycle, that is generated by the forwarding
procedure.
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
3500
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61
Time (Number of TDMA cycles)
D
e
l
a
y

(
m
s
)
3 hops
2 hops
1 hop
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
3500
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61
D
e
l
a
y

(
m
s
)
3 hops
2 hops
1 hop
Figure 5.7: Average Delay, = 3pkt/10s (left) = 1pkt/5s (right)
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45 47
D
u
t
y

C
y
c
l
e

(
%
)
1 tx slot
2 tx slots
3 tx slots
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58
Time (Number of TDMA cycles)
D
u
t
y

C
y
c
l
e

%
1 tx slot
2 tx slots
3 tx slots
Figure 5.8: Average Duty Cycle, = 3pkt/10s (left) = 1pkt/5s (right)
5.4 Network Lifetime Estimation
We refer to data in Table 4.2 and the experimental results on the duty cycle
to estimate the network lifetime. The cluster 4 has the highest duty cycle.
Note that nodes in this cluster are the most loaded in terms of trac to
forward.
We focus on the experiment with = 3pkt/10sec (Table 5.3). In Table
5.3, the time distribution of the dierent states during a TDMA-cycle ( =
10800ms) is reported, with the relative energy consumption.
Table 5.3: Time distribution and energy consumption in a TDMA-cycle
State Time Percentage Energy Consumption
Shutdown 10141ms 93.89% 1.2 J
Idle 646ms 5.98% 383 J
Transmission 6ms 0.05% 156 J
Reception 7ms 0.06% 203 J
Transmission and reception times include the time for transmitting and
receiving packets and acknowledgements. Idle time is mainly composed of
the time for listening and solving contentions.
The TDMA structure allows nodes to remain in shutdown state for an high
percentage of time ( 94%), consuming a negligible amount of energy. Trans-
mission and reception consumptions are balanced in order of magnitude,
while the energy spent in idle state is slightly predominant. However, Fig.
5.9 shows that a node is in idle state for an average of 98% of the active
time
2
.
The total energy consumption in a TDMA-cycle is E
= 743.2J, which
corresponds to an average node power consumption of P = 68.8W. Conse-
quently, according to Equation 4.3 the estimated lifetime is:
T =
2
7414P + 0.1
3.2 years (5.1)
For instance, in paper [28], the lifetime of a B-MAC protocol (Section
2.5.3) in indoor monitoring applications is estimated in 1.1 years.
2
The active time is the sum of idle, transmission and reception time. It is related to
the duty cycle
Idle 0,90%
Reception 1,10%
Transmission 98%
Reception
Idle
Shutdown 93,89%
Active Time 6,11%
0,90%
1,10%
43%
Active Time Distribution
0,9%
1,1%
98,0%
Transmission
Reception
Idle
Time Distribution
93,89%
6,11%
Shutdown
Active Time
Figure 5.9: Time distribution
Chapter 6
Conclusions
6.1 Conclusions of the Work
The achieved objectives of this Thesis can be resumed, referring to dierent
levels.
Regarding theoretical aspects, we provided a survey on the applications
and the design of cross-layer protocols on WSNs. We focused the attention
on SERAN, a semi-random protocol for clustered wireless sensor networks,
proposed in its rst formulation in paper [1]. SERAN satises system level
requirements on packet delay and successful transmission probability while
minimizing energy consumption. SERAN is characterized by a mathematical
model that allows for cross-layer optimization without the need for extensive
simulations.
We enhanced the optimization problem, including a mathematical analy-
sis of the PRR. The main advantage is the possibility of an on-line optimiza-
tion, which considers the actual dynamics in the network.
The major part of the work concerned the implementation of SERAN on
Tmote Sky motes, using TinyOS.
The presented experimental results demonstrate the eectiveness of the
implementation. The protocol allows the network to get excellent perfor-
mance for low data rate transmissions, ensuring low average node duty cycle,
which yields a long network lifetime.
70
CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSIONS 71
6.2 Future Developments
An ongoing project is the denition of a GUI interface for SERAN, that allows
showing the behavior of the network with dierent levels of abstraction.
Future work includes performing a set of experiments with a wide experi-
mental evaluation of the SERAN protocol, in several scenarios of trac load,
node clustering, cluster size, channel conditions, and performance require-
ments.
An improvable part of the protocol is the acknowledgement-based con-
tention scheme. We noticed it gives physical limits to the CSMA-slot dura-
tion. Dierent mechanisms, as the use of Beacon messages in paper [6], can
be exploited, comparing SERAN with other solutions of cross-layer protocol.
Also the interaction with the standard IEEE 802.15.4 [31] might be analyzed,
both in the mathematical formulation and in the practical implementation.
Furthermore, aggregation algorithms can be included in the framework
to increase the eective throughput at no power cost, whenever aggregate
information is required.
Appendix A
Protocol Parameters
Topology Parameters
P Number of paths
B
i
Number of clusters in the path i
N Number of nodes per cluster
Channel Parameters
c Channel gain
Application Parameters
Packet generation rate
PRR
min
Minimum Packet Reception Rate
D
max
Maximum end-to-end Delay
MAC/Routing Parameters
p Access probability
S TDMA-slot duration
T
f
Number of TDMA-slots in a TDMA-cycle
CSMA-slot duration
TDMA-cycle duration
k Number of packets to send in the cluster
k
Expected time to evacuate a cluster
72
APPENDIX A. PROTOCOL PARAMETERS 73
Physical Layer Parameters
E
pkt
Energy spent for a single data transmission
E
ack
Energy spent for a single ACK transmission
R Energy spent for a single wake up
W Energy (per unit time) spent during the listening
N
pkt
Average number of data transmissions
N
ack
Average number of ACK transmissions
N
wu
Total number of wake-ups
TinyOS Parameters Value
DATA CHANNEL Data communication channel 15
ACK CHANNEL Acknowledgement channel 14
TOKEN CHANNEL Synchronization channel 15
MESS LENGTH Length of data message 28 bytes
ACK LENGTH Length of ACK 24 bytes
TOKEN LENGTH Length of synchronization message 28 bytes
Appendix B
Packet Structure
SERAN Payload
typedef nx struct DataMsg {
nx uint16 t seqnum; Data Sequence Number
nx uint8 t sourceid; Software ID of the source node
nx uint8 t forwardid; Software ID of the node that forwards the packet
nx uint8 t destgroupid; Software ID of the destination node
nx uint8 t tracrate; Trac rate in pkt/s
nx uint8 t TDMAslotdur; TDMA-slot (in number of CSMA-slots)
nx uint8 t slots; CSMA-slot number
nx uint16 t dutycycle; Evaluated node duty cycle
nx uint16 t delay; Time-stamp for the evaluation of delays
} DataMsg;
typedef nx struct AckMsg {
nx uint8 t sourceid; Software ID of the ACK source node
nx uint8 t forwardid; Software ID of the node that forwarded the data
nx uint8 t destgroupid; Software ID of the data source node
nx uint8 t prr; Evaluated PRR (from the sink node)
nx uint8 t slots; CSMA-slot number
} ACKMsg;
74
APPENDIX B. PACKET STRUCTURE 75
typedef nx struct SyncMsg {
nx uint8 t sourceid; Software ID of the source node
nx uint8 t forwardid; Software ID of the node that forwards the token
nx uint8 t destgroupid; Software ID of the destination node
nx uint8 t tracrate; Trac rate in pkt/s
nx uint8 t slots; free
nx uint16 t dutycycle; free
nx uint16 t delay; Synchronization time
} SyncMsg;
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Protocol Design and Implementation For Wireless Sensor Network

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