2010 IEEE 24th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops

Optimizing Duty-Cycle for Delay and Energy Bound WSN Applications

Pardeep Kumar, Mesut G nes, Qasim Mushtaq, Jochen Schiller u
Institute of Computer Science Freie Universit t Berlin, Berlin, Germany a Email: {pardeep.kumar, mesut.guenes, qasim.mushtaq, jochen.schiller}@fu-berlin.de

AbstractDespite their limited resources, especially energy, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being accepted in many application areas. This makes them a challenging yet an appealing research area. Evidently, a lot of research work revolves around energy efciency in order to prolong WSNs lifetime. A prominent amount of work suggests keeping radios of sensor nodes in low power sleep mode for most of the time. However, this duty-cycling results in increased network latency. Selection of an optimal duty-cycle is always challenging especially for applications where latency, along with energy consumption, plays an important role. This paper evaluates AREA-MAC for delay, energy, and packet delivery ratio factors for several duty-cycle values. AREA-MAC is a medium access control (MAC) protocol designed for realtime and energy-efcient WSN applications. Linear optimization is used to nd the optimal value of duty-cycle in order to minimize delay and energy consumption and by keeping packet delivery ratio above a certain threshold. Index TermsWireless sensor networks, medium access control protocol, latency, energy-efciency.

I. INTRODUCTION Low power and low communication ranges of nodes lead to a dense deployment for a WSN. An efcient MAC protocol can handle a number of medium-sharing nodes in a better way and establish efcient communication links between them. Most of the proposed MAC protocols for WSNs [1][9] are designed to prolong WSN lifetime by choosing energyefcient operations. Several techniques have been used to extend WSN lifetime. A prominent amount of work suggests keeping radios of nodes in low-power sleep mode for most of the time. However, this leads in increased network latency and many innovative WSN applications demand delay bound operations along with their longevity. To prolong WSNs lifetime, the low power listening (LPL) technique has been used in WiseMAC [4] and B-MAC [9] protocols, where nodes send a preamble preceding the actual data packet. These protocols use the LPL with long preambles, where nodes remain awake for the whole preamble time even if they are not the target node. This cause higher latency, energy consumption, and control overhead on nodes [8]. An Asynchronous Real-time Energy-efcient and Adaptive MAC (AREA-MAC) protocol [10] provides an improved performance in terms of timeliness and energy-efciency for WSN applications. AREA-MAC also uses the LPL but, with short preamble messages and with a destination address and an acknowledgement combination. A node using AREA-MAC wakes up for a short interval to sense the carrier activity. If the
978-0-7695-4019-1/10 $26.00 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/WAINA.2010.139

channel is free and the node has data to send, it sends a short preamble packet prior to the data packet. The node then waits for a short period of time to receive an acknowledgement from the target node. A data packet is sent immediately on reception of an acknowledgement from the target node. On the other hand, if the node does not receive an acknowledgement within the specied time period, it goes to short sleep mode. This process minimizes latency and energy consumption not only at the source node but also at non-targeted nodes in the form of reduced collisions, idle listening, overhearing, and overemitting. In this paper, two types of preamble sending scenarios namely Norm-pre and Dest-pre are used. In the Normpre scenario, nodes simply broadcast preambles and then wait for acknowlegement from any of their neighbors. Whereas, in the Dest-pre scenario, nodes send preamble to specic neighbors in the direction of sink node i.e., preambles with embedded destination address in order to further decrease latency. We will discuss the detailed working of AREA-MAC in the next section. The comparison of AREA-MAC with the B-MAC protocol is shown in [10], where AREA-MAC outperforms B-MAC in almost every aspect. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of AREA-MAC with varying duty-cycle. We examine the effect of several duty-cycle values on delay, energy consumption and packet delivery ratio. We, then, use linear optimization to nd the optimal value of dutycycle which can yield minimum delay and energy consumption values and keep packet delivery ratio above a certain threshold. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The next section details the working of AREA-MAC with its characteristics, network, energy, and delay models. Afterwards, in Section III, the evaluation of AREA-MAC is elaborated. Subsequently, Section IV optimizes duty-cycle for minimum delay and energy consumption. Section V briefs state of the art whereas Section VI concludes the paper. II. AREA-MAC AREA-MAC is designed to provide a suitable solution for time critical and energy-efcient WSN applications and, at the same time to provide an acceptable trade-off between other parameters. Nodes using AREA-MAC have short and adaptive preambles with a destination address and an acknowledgement combination. A node using AREA-MAC wakes up for a short interval to sense the carrier activity. It sends a short

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Wake-up

Wake-up

Yes CCA No Receive preamble

Send something (if required)

Try to receive something

No CCA Yes No Queue > 0 Yes

No

For me? Yes Yes Send ACK

Send preamble

Got ACK Yes

No

Receive data

Send data

Short sleep

Send ACK

Optional for data reliability

Optional for data reliability

No Got ACK Yes Yes

Yes Queue > 0 No Long sleep No

Queue > 0 No

Long sleep

Fig. 1.

A ow chart showing reception at the node using AREA-MAC.

Fig. 2.

A ow chart showing transmission at the node using AREA-MAC.

preamble packet prior to the data packet, if the channel is free. A preamble packet contains source and target addresses. The node then waits for a short period of time to receive an acknowledgement from the target node. A data packet is sent only on reception of an acknowledgement from the target node. Otherwise, the source node goes to the short sleep mode, wakes up after a very short interval, and tries again. The node goes to the long sleep mode after failing to receive an acknowledgement for a maximum number of allowed attempts. The short sleep mode is used to facilitate real-time applications, where nodes go to sleep mode for a very short period of time. This time is little longer than the time required to switch the radio from one mode to other. However, the long sleep is the normal time for which nodes have to sleep periodically. This depends on the slot-duration time selected by the application. All nodes wake up periodically at each slot-duration time to perform the LPL. This is a very important factor as it decides duty-cycle value of the network. On the other hand, if the channel is busy, the node tries to receive a preamble. If the the target address of the preamble matches with its address (for Dest-pre scenario) or if it is a broadcast preamble, the node immediately sends an acknowledgement and receives data from the source node. Otherwise it goes back to sleep mode. This whole process of reception at a node using AREA-MAC is sketched in Figure 1 whereas, Figure 2 depicts the transmission process. In order to increase the data reliability, the optional data-acknowledgement mech-

anism may be used where, after sending a data packet, a node waits for an acknowledgement from the source node. If it does not receive an acknowledgement within a specic time, it goes to a short sleep mode, wakes up soon, and repeats the whole process again. This reliability will effect network timeliness and energy consumption. To further improve timeliness and energy efciency, nodes after completing their communication, check their data queue rather then going to sleep mode directly. The node restarts its cycle from the carrier sense, if there is a data packet in its data queue. Nodes using AREA-MAC are fully independent of sleep and wake-up schedules of other nodes. They do not require a system-wide synchronization, which resolve overhead and scaling issues. Nodes also adopt their duty-cycle according to the real-time request received from their neighbors. Moreover, AREA-MAC is scalable and robust to topology changes. Unlike cluster-based approaches, where nodes only communicate via cluster heads, nodes using AREA-MAC communicate directly with peers. A. Network Model We consider a WSN consisting of several nodes and terminating at the sink node. All nodes except the sink node are normal nodes that sense the environment, transmit, and receive. They have no aggregation or in-network capabilities. We assume that all nodes are xed and know their locations regarding to some reference nodes. The selection and working of reference nodes is out of our scope. We also assume that

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all nodes except the sink node have limited and non-replicable energy resources. A WSN is represented by an undirected graph G(V, E), where V = {v0 , v1 , ..., vN 1 } is the set of N sensor nodes IDs and E is the set of edges connecting those nodes. Nodes are placed at the location (x, y). Given the node ID, its location can be easily calculated and vice-versa [11]. The node v0 represents the sink node, whereas nodes from v1 to vN 1 represent normal sensor nodes. An neighbor of a node vi is called its up-level neighbor, if its location parameters (x, y) satisfy one of these three conditions: (a) if its x value is equal to the x value of vi , then its y value should be less than y value of vi , (b) if its y value is equal to the y value of vi , then its x value should be less than x value of vi , or (c) both x, y values are less than the x, y values of vi . B. Energy Model We divide the system time T into small discrete time intervals, t0 , t1 , ..., tn . For simplicity, all time intervals are normalized to one time unit. The total energy consumption of a node vi per unit of time, Evi , is given by its energy consumption in LPL, environment sense, reception, transmission, and sleep states respectively and shown in (1). Equation (2) shows the power consumption and time spent by a node in the respective state. Evi = Elpl + Esense + Erx + Etx + Esleep = Plpl Tlpl + Psense Tsense + Prx Trx + Ptx Ttx + Psleep Tsleep (1) (2)

Ldata is the total length of data packet in bytes, Tsw is the radio switching time from one mode to other, Rdata is the rate at which nodes send/receive data packets, and Tbyte is the time required to send/receive one byte. A node may receive multiple preambles during a time period. But when it becomes a target node for a specic preamble, it immediately sends an acknowledgement to the sender and receives its packet. A node is supposed to be in sleep mode, if it is not doing anything else. Trx = Trxdata + Trxpre + 2 Tsw + Tack (7) (8) (9)

Trxdata = Ldata Rdata Tbyte Tsleep = 1 (Tlpl + Tsense + Trx + Ttx ) C. Delay Model

The duty-cycle results in higher latency for WSNs. In AREA-MAC, all nodes are xed and know their up-level neighbors. Therefore, in case of a real-time data, a node requests/forces an up-level neighbor to wake up regardless of its normal schedule or period and to perform data processing. We calculate the wake-up interval for an aperiodic trafc on the basis of Poisson distribution and calculate the expected number of real-time events occurring in an interval. If the rate of occurrences within an interval is , then the probability that there are exactly k occurrences is given by (10). For every occurrence of k, a node wakes up and performs data processing. f (k; ) = k e /k! k0 (10)

A node performs LPL at every wake-up interval Iwakeup and senses the carrier before sending a preamble. It also senses the environment to measure physical values such as temperature, humidity, air velocity, or light. Talpl Iwakeup = Tasense Rsense Tlpl = (3) (4)

The total delay required to transfer a packet from vi to vj , i.e., Dvi ,vj can be divided into three steps; delay at the source node vi , delay at all intermediate nodes vf , and delay at the destination node vj , each denoted by Dvi , Df , and Dvj respectively. If the set F contains all forwarding nodes such that vf F V , the processing delay at each node is Tpro , and the queuing delay is Tque then: Dvi = Tlpl + Tsense + Tcarrier + Ttx + Tsw + Tpro Df =
vf F

Tsense

Where Rsense is the rate at which a node senses the environment. Talpl and Tasense are the average times required for the LPL and environment sensing respectively. The transmission time of a node is the sum of times required to send data packets, preambles, and acknowledgement requests and is shown in Equation (5). Whenever, a node has data to send, it sends a preamble and immediately changes its radio to listen mode in order to receive the acknowledgement. This process is repeated until it receives an acknowledgement from the target node. Q is the number of attempts a node sends a preamble and changes its radio to receive an acknowledgement per unit time. P is the maximum number of allowed attempts, such that 0 Q P , before a node goes to long sleep mode. Ttx = Ttxdata + Q (Ttxpre + Tsw ) + Tack Ttxdata = Ldata Rdata Tbyte (5) (6)

(11)

Tlpl + Tcarrier + Trx + Ttx + Tsw + Tpro + Tque (12)

Dvj = Tlpl + Tcarrier + Trx + Tsw + Tpro + Tque Dvi ,vj = Dvi + Df + Dvj III. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

(13) (14)

AREA-MAC is implemented on the basis of an OMNeT++ based simulation framework given in [10] and the simulation conguration given in Table I. All results are drawn by using the box-whisker graphs, where rectangular boxes show the condence interval of 95%. The upper and lower whisker bars show the maximum and minimum values respectively. Results from both preamble sending scenarios i.e., Norm-pre and Destpre are compared and discussed.

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TABLE I S IMULATION CONFIGURATION AT DIFFERENT LAYERS Layer Parameter Value Simulation area 800 800 No. of nodes 16 Topology Grid General Bit rate 19200 bps Simulation runs 100 Simulation time/run 1000s Packet payload 128 bits App layer Data generating interval 60s Data generating deviation 60s Packet header length 10 bits MAC layer Queue size 100 Slot-duration times 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 10s Carrier frequency 868MHz PHY layer Propagation model Nakagami

300

Delay at the sink node (ms)

250 200 150 100 50 0 1 2 3 4 Slot duration (sec) 5 10

Fig. 4.

Dest-pre: delay at the sink node

A. Average end-to-end delay The average end-to-end delay is the average of times per simulation run needed for data packets to arrive at the sink node. Figures 3 and 4 show average end-to-end delay for Norm-pre and Dest-pre respectively. The Dest-pre scenario signicantly decrease delay at the sink node compared to the Norm-pre scenario for the respective slot-duration value. For the Norm-pre scenario, nodes only broadcast preambles and any neighboring node, irrespective of its location, can receive and process preambles. Whereas, with the Dest-pre scenario, nodes only send/forward packets in the direction of sink node, i.e., towards up-level neighbors. This reduces average delay by almost half compared to that of Norm-pre scenario. B. Energy consumption We calculate energy consumption of a node by quantifying the time for which its radio remains in sleep, receive or transmit mode. As the sink node does not have any energy barriers therefore, all the results related to energy consumption are taken for normal nodes. Figures 5 and 6 show average sleep time for the network for both Norm-pre and Dest-pre scenarios respectively. The results achieved with our study show that for both type of scenarios, the average time spent in sleep mode for the network is almost the same. A node consumes
600

relatively more energy at the slot-duration of 1s and 10s. From these gures it is clear that AREA-MAC provides more than 98% duty-cycle, which is encouraging for WSN applications. Similarly, average times spent in transmit and receive mode for both scenarios are almost the same. Due to space limitation, we do not present them in this paper. C. Packet delivery ratio In AREA-MAC, all nodes except the sink node generate, receive, and forward data packets to the sink node. Hence, packets sent by a node include both the packets it generates and receives from its neighbors. Figures 7 and 8 show packet delivery ratio of the packets received at the sink node to the packets generated by other nodes. This ratio is slightly higher for the Norm-pre scenario as compared to the Dest-pre. This is because of the fact that nodes in Norm-pre scenario can receive and response preambles from any of their neighbors irrespective of their location. Whereas, in Dest-pre scenario, nodes only receive packets from their low-level neighbors and forward them to their up-level neighbors. Hence, AREA-MAC delivers almost more than 90% packets to the sink node, which is more than enough for many WSN applications.

990

Time spent in the sleep mode (sec)

1 2 3 4 Slot duration (sec) 5 10

Delay at the sink node (ms)

500 400 300 200 100 0

980 970 960 950 940 930 920 1 2 3 4 Slot duration (sec) 5 10

Fig. 3.

Norm-pre: delay at the sink node

Fig. 5.

Norm-pre: time spent in sleep mode

695

Packet delivery ratio at the sink node

1 2 3 4 Slot duration (sec) 5 10

990

1 0.98 0.96 0.94 0.92 0.9 0.88 0.86 0.84 1 2 3 4 Slot duration (sec) 5 10

Time spent in the sleep mode (sec)

980 970 960 950 940 930 920

Fig. 6.

Dest-pre: time spent in sleep mode

Fig. 8.

Dest-pre: packet delivery ratio

OP-1 IV. SLOT-DURATION OPTIMIZATION Results shown in the previous section demonstrate that the slot-duration value effects the overall performance of a WSN. Selecting an optimal slot-duration value for any application is challenging, especially for AREA-MAC where nodes generate data packets and preambles randomly. Moreover, they also sleep and wake up asynchronously. In order to yield an optimal slot-duration value so that delay and energy consumption (time spent in wake-up mode) can be minimized, two optimization problems namely OP-1 and OP-2 are considered here. OP-1 minimizes delay with respect to slot-duration (sd) time and OP-2 minimizes wake-up time of nodes for a given sd time. The total wake-up time Twakevi of the node vi is given by Ttotal Tsleepvi and pdr is the packet delivery ratio of packets received at the sink node to total packets generated by other nodes. Constraint (a) ensures Twakevi below a threshold and Constraints (e) limits delay Dvi ,v0 below a threshold . Constraints (b) and (f) keep pdr above a threshold , whereas Constraints (c) and (g) force pdr to remain below 1. Constraints (d) and (h) are the non-negativity constraints to prevent values going below 0.
1

min s.t.

Dvi ,v0
sd

vi , v0 V ; i > 0

Twakevi pdr pdr 1 sd, Twakevi , , 0 OP-2 min s.t. Dvi ,v0 pdr pdr 1 sd, Dvi ,v0 , , 0 Twakevi
sd

vi V ; i > 0

(a) (b) (c) (d)

vi V ; i > 0

vi , v0 V ; i > 0

(e) (f) (g) (h)

Packet delivery ratio at the sink node

0.99 0.98 0.97 0.96 0.95 0.94 1 2 3 4 Slot duration (sec) 5 10

A. Optimal solution The exact calculation for such optimal problems is a difcult task, since data packets and preamble generation are randomized and sleep and wake-up times of nodes are asynchronous. By considering previous results and applying linear regression, approximate relationships between parameters are drawn. These relationships are then ne tuned empirically for both scenario in order to perfectly present the results. Relationships for Norm-pre scenario are given below. 0.026sd + 0.05 0.026sd + 0.02 8.26sd + 29.16 0.43sd + 8.335 1 sd 2 3 sd 10 1 sd 2 3 sd 10

delay =

energy =

Fig. 7.

Norm-pre: packet delivery ratio

pdr 0.001sd + 0.982 =

696

Whereas, relationships between parameters for Dist-pre scenario are as follows. 0.012sd + 0.045 0.0087sd + 0.0345 8.26sd + 29.16 0.43sd + 8.335 1 sd 2 3 sd 10 1 sd 2 3 sd 10

MAC protocols are designed to minimize energy consumption while ignoring or dealing with network latency as a secondary objective. This motivates us to design AREA-MAC. VI. CONCLUSION This paper evaluates AREA-MAC with the perspective of optimizing slot-duration time. After discussing the detailed working of AREA-MAC with its network, energy, and delay models, several simulation results for Norm-pre and Destpre scenarios are presented. Results show that the Dest-pre scenario almost halves end-to-end delay as compared to Normpre scenario while keeping energy consumption at the same level and slightly decreasing packet delivery ratio. Linear optimization is then used to optimize slot-duration time in order to achieve minimum delay and energy consumption for a network. Optimization results show that the optimal values of slot-duration are 1s for OP-1 and 2s for OP-2 for the Normpre scenario. However, the optimal slot-duration time for the Dest-pre scenario is 3s for both OP-1 and OP-2. Our next task is to implement AREA-MAC on MSB-A2 Scatterweb sensor nodes used in the DES-Testbed deployed at our university (http://www.des-testbed.net). R EFERENCES
[1] W. Ye, J. Heidemann, and D. Estrin, Medium access control with coordinated adaptive sleeping for wireless sensor networks, IEEE/ACM Trans. Net., vol. 12, pp. 493506, June 2004. [2] W. Heinzelman, A. Chandrakasan, and H. Balakrishnan, An application-specic protocol architecture for wireless microsensor networks, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 1, October 2002. [3] V. Rajendran, K. Obraczka, and J. J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, Energyefcient, collision-free medium access control for wireless sensor networks, ACM SenSys, Los Angeles, CA, November 2003. [4] A. El-Hoiydi and J. Decotignie, WiseMAC: An ultra low power mac protocol for the downlink of infrastructure wireless sensor networks, Ninth IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communication, ISCC04, pp. 244251, June 2004. [5] C. Schurgers, V. Tsiatsis, S. Ganeriwal, and M. Srivastava, Optimizing sensor networks in the energy-latency-density design space, IEEE transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 7080, 2002. [6] P. Lin, C. Qiao, and X. Wang, Medium access control with a dynamic duty cycle for sensor networks, IEEE WCNC, vol. 3, pp. 15341539, March 2004. [7] T. van Dam and K. Langendoen, An adaptive energy-efcient mac protocol for wireless sensor networks, 1st ACM Conf. on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), pp. 171180, November 2003. [8] M. Buettner, G. Yee, E. Anderson, and R. Han, X-MAC: A short preamble mac protocol for duty-cycled wireless networks, 4th ACM Conf. on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), Boulder, CO, pp. 307320, November 2006. [9] J. Polastre, J. Hill, and D. Culler, Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks, 2nd ACM Conf. on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2004), Baltimore, MD, pp. 95107, November 2004. [10] P. Kumar, M. G nes, Q. Mushtaq, and B. Blywis, A real-time and u energy-efcient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks, International Journal of Ultra Wideband Communications and Systems (IJUWBCS). to be published, http://sites.google.com/site/ijuwbcs/accepted. [11] P. Kumar and M. G nes, MAC protocols for low-latency and energyu efcient WSN applications, Tech. Rep. TR-B-08-18, FU Berlin, Germany, December 2008. [12] P. Kumar, M. G nes, A. A. Almamou, and J. Schiller, Real-time, u bandwidth, and energy efcient IEEE 802.15.4 for medical applications, 7. GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespr ch Drahtlose Sensornetze, FU Berlin, a Germany, September 2008.

delay =

energy =

pdr 0.01sd + 0.905 = Depending on these relationships and conguration given in Table I, both optimization problems are solved. Optimal values are shown in Table II. Final values for thresholds , , and for the Norm-pre scenario are 35s, 350ms, and 0.98 and for the Dest-pre scenario are 35s, 150ms, and 0.90 respectively. Hence, the Dest-pre scenario provides optimal results at the slot-duration of 3s with minimum trade-off in terms of both delay and energy consumption. Whereas, the Norm-pre scenario provides optimal delay at slot-duration of 1s and optimal energy at 2s. However, pdr is marginally higher for the Norm-pre scenario.
TABLE II S OLUTION OF OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS

Scenario Norm-pre Dest-pre

OP OP-1 OP-2 OP-1 OP-2

sd 1 2 3 3

delay 80 ms 100 ms 60 ms 60 ms

energy 20.9 s 12.64 s 9.63 s 9.63 s

pdr 0.98 0.98 0.94 0.94

V. RELATED WORK Due to space limitation, different WSN MAC protocols are only briey discussed here. Their detailed discussion is given in [11]. S-MAC [1] circumvents idle listening, collisions, and overhearing by using periodic and xed-length wake-up and sleep periods, but it is rigid and optimized for a predened set of workloads. Synchronization and longer sleep periods result in higher latency. Time-out MAC (T-MAC) [7] protocol improves S-MAC by adaptively shortening the listen period by monitoring for a threshold period. T-MAC suffers from early sleeping, reduced throughput, additional latency, complexity, and scaling problems. The CSMA based B-MAC [9] protocol uses low power listening (LPL) with an extended preamble to reduce duty-cycle and idle listening. It has an overhearing issue and the long preamble dominates the energy usage. The TDMA based LEACH [2] divides a WSN into clusters, each supervised by the cluster-head. Always-on cluster-heads and scalability are major problems with LEACH. The emerging IEEE 802.15.4 standard also has limitations, especially for real-time, energy-efcient, and bandwidth critical WSN applications, identied in [12]. Almost all state of the art WSN

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