TreeMAC : Localized TDMA MAC Protocol for Real-time High-data-rate Sensor Networks

Washington State University

Sensorweb Research Laboratory

TreeMAC : Localized TDMA MAC Protocol for Real-time

High-data-rate Sensor Networks

Wen-Zhan Song (WSU) Renjie Huang (WSU)

Behrooz Shirazi (WSU)Richard LaHusen (USGS)

IEEE PerCom 2009 March 11, 2009

*This research is supported by NASA and USGS under grant NNX06AE42G.

-2- Washington State University


OutlineOutline

Introduction Related Works Design and Analysis Experiments and Evaluations Conclusion and Future Work



Medium Access Control Medium Access Control (MAC)(MAC)

MAC, controlling access to the channel, plays a key role in determining channel capacity utilization throughput and delay energy consumption and lifetime congestion fairness

u

send?receive?sleep?



MAC Research ChallengesMAC Research Challenges

The MAC research challenges in sensor network mainly come from the facts that: Radio broadcast nature – interferences are complex Multi-hop networking – nodes are not in one collision domain Limited energy supplies – nodes are powered by battery only

(a) Hidden station problem (b) Exposed station problem



Existing Sensor Net MAC Existing Sensor Net MAC protocolsprotocols

The first generation sensor networks are characterized by low data rates (sampling intervals on the order of minutes) and very low duty-cycle operation to conserve power

Such as habit monitoring, microclimate monitoring MAC protocol: periodic wakeup, sense and sleep to

reduce idle listening energy waste: Examples: S-MAC (INFOCOM 2002) and B-MAC (Sensys 2004)




Recent sensor network applications involve relatively high data rates (e.g., 102 to 105 Hz sampling rate) and precise timing of the captured signals. High throughput, low delay, and network fairness are as important as energy conservations.

Such as structural health monitoring, medical monitoring, industrial process control, volcano monitoring, land seismic.

TDMA MAC protocol is a natural choice: Examples: Z-MAC (SenSys 2005), Funneling-MAC (SenSys 2006)



Existing Sensor Net MAC Existing Sensor Net MAC protocols protocols Z-MAC Z-MAC

Two nodes in the interference range assigned to different time slots: based on DRAND

Hybrid CSMA+TDMA Use a base TDMA schedule as a hint to schedule the

transmissions of the nodes, and it differs from TDMA by allowing non-owners of slots to 'steal' the slot from owners based on CSMA if they are not transmitting.

C D

A

FB

C D

A E

B

E

F

Radio Interference Map

Input Graph

C D

A E

B F

DRAND slot assignment0

0

1

32



Existing Sensor Net MAC Existing Sensor Net MAC protocols protocols Z-MAC Z-MAC

Limitations: The slot assignment overhead is high

Need to re-run DRAND if topology changes After DRAND, every node needs to

decide frame size based on conventional wisdom – synchronize with rest of the network on Maximum Slot Number (MSN) as the frame size MSN has to flood through whole network.



Existing Sensor Net MAC Existing Sensor Net MAC protocols protocols Funneling- Funneling-MACMAC

Limitations: assume sink can reach all nodes in intensity region



TreeMAC: key observationsTreeMAC: key observations

In general, wireless mesh networks or other traditional networks are designed to support mutual communications among nodes.

The traffic pattern is any-to-any, driven by user demands.

In many wireless sensor network applications, sensor nodes monitor fields and generate events which traverse hop-by-hop toward one or more sink nodes.

The major traffic pattern is many-to-one, forming a data collection tree.

Equal channel access is not fair for data collection.

1

523

4

2

1

11

1

u v



TreeMAC: key observationsTreeMAC: key observations

depth k

depth k+1

In a data collection tree, the tx time slots of depth-k nodes shall be no less than the sum of the tx time slots of depth-(k+1) nodes and the slot demand of the depth-k nodes’ own data: T(k) >= T(k+1) + D(k) Slot reuse maximization based on graph coloring does not necessarily maximize data collection throughput.

the network may have more data flowing, but the sink does not necessarily get more data – it could be dropped in funnelling region.



TreeMAC: key ideasTreeMAC: key ideas

Time divided to cycles Cycle divided to N frames (configurable, e.g., 16 in the illustration). Frame divided to 3 slots:

Slot 0: red Slot 1: green Slot 2: blue Each node picks slot according to its tree-level only (e.g., level%3)

Each node can only send in picked slot per frame, listen/sleep in the other two Mitigate vertical 2-hop interference

Each node assign its children’s frames in the beginning of each cycle, such that children’s frames does not overlap/conflict with each other.

Node’s tx/rx slot is determined by the frame-slot pair (F, S).

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F

…… cycle ……



0

TreeMAC: key ideas TreeMAC: key ideas Children get parent’s frames subset

e

sink

a

b

c

d

o

h

p

j

f

g

i

k

ln

m

0

0

1

1

1

1

2

0

00 0

1

1

2

2

Every node get number of slots proportional to its bandwidth demand



Conflict-free transceiving and Conflict-free transceiving and snoopingsnooping

Other MAC: conflict-free transceiving

TreeMAC: conflict-free transceiving and snooping

receiver

sender

snooper

u

v x

y

w

u

v x

y

w

We proved: with TreeMAC, given any node, there is at most one active sender in its neighborhood (including itself) at any time.



Note on Interference ModelNote on Interference Model Like other MAC protocols, our theory

analysis is based on the widely used protocol interference model: In this model, a transmission by a node vi is

successfully received by a node vj iff vj is not in the transmission range of the source of any other simultaneous transmission.

It does not necessarily provide a comprehensive view of reality, due to aggregate effect of radio interference. But it does provide some good estimations of interference and enables a theoretical performance analysis of number of protocols in the literature.



Optimal and bufferless Optimal and bufferless schedulingscheduling

1

0

1

a

bf

We proved: TreeMAC protocol is a fair and bufferlesspacket scheduling protocol. The throughput of TreeMAC protocol is at least 1/3 of the optimum, and the packet delay of per round is bounded by 3 times of the optimum.



Possible deployment strategyPossible deployment strategy

sink 0 sink 1 sink 2

gateway

If there are 3 sinks connected to gateway, then

The 3 different sink trees use 3 different channels

Given a node u in the sub-tree of sink i, the transmittable slot tu = (lu+i) % 3



TreeMAC design TreeMAC design considerationsconsiderations

System Initialization and Time Synchronization Initially, nodes run CSMA to discover neighbors and

routing path, and perform network time synchronization using FTSP. Sink node initiates the TreeMAC mode by assigning the frames to its children.

Any node who receives schedules from its parent, will switch to TreeMAC mode and assign the frames to its own children as well. During the transition period from CSMA to TreeMAC mode, nodes in CSMA mode have less opportunity to access channel using longer backoff period.

To avoid accumulated synchronization error to new cycle, TreeMAC uses two timers: slot timer and cycle timer. When the cycle timer fires, it stops and restart the slot timer, so that the slot timer gets re-synchronized after each cycle.




Obtaining Tree Structure Information TreeMAC protocol does not need separate tree

formation and maintenance. It obtains the parent and children information from the routing tables of data collection routing protocol.

Dynamic topology update. A neighbor management module maintains children set information based on upstream packets. Use timeout mechanism to detect children join/leave.

If a node changes parent, we do not adjust frame-slot assignment immediately. Instead, wait until next cycle. The temporary mismatch does not necessarily break the TreeMAC foundation that T(k) >= T(k+1) + D(k)




Frame-Slot Schedule Assignment and Adjustment Each node’s bandwidth demand level = R/p, here R is

total data rate of its subtree, and p is the link reliability of a node to its parent.

Bandwidth demand information is piggybacked in routing beacon message to reduce overhead.

traffic

demand

#1 #2 Child …

Parent’s own schedule

round robin

Every node uses round robin method to assign frames to its children based on their proportional bandwidth demand



Testbed setupTestbed setup

We conducted the experiments on a sensor network test bed with 24 iMote2 motes

We compared TreeMAC with Funneling-MAC and CSMA (the default MAC in TinyOS), under various network traffic and topologies Under each network condition, the same experiment

is repeated 5 times to get an average Network throughput, energy efficiency, network

fairness, signaling overhead are evaluated



Testbed setupTestbed setup



Network throughputNetwork throughput

We measure the network throughput by calculating how many data packets are successfully delivered to the sink from all nodes in one second.

(a) Network throughput with varying injected data rate [4, 12] pkts/second

(b) Network throughput with different network size [8, 24]



Network throughputNetwork throughput

(c) Network throughput over running time [8, 24]

TreeMAC is robust with respect to dynamic topology and can obtain stable performance in the long run.



Energy efficiencyEnergy efficiency

Energy efficiency is defined as the ratio of the number of delivered distinct packets to the gateway over the total number of transmitted packet in the network.

D is the set of packets delivered to the sink;

P is the set of all injected packets;

hops(p) ranges over each hop packet p traverses;

xmits(p, h) denotes the number of transmissions a packet p undergoes at hop h.



Network fairnessNetwork fairness

Fairness: how equally every node has delivered data to gateway. We define fairness index as:

ri is the average rate of packets delivered from the ith sensor;

N is the number of sensors in the network.

If the network is more fair, the index is closer to 1.



Signalling overheadSignalling overhead

TreeMAC overhead: the dissemination of bandwidth demand and frame-slot schedule messages.

Funneling-MAC overhead: beacon packets, path information field, schedule packets, meta-schedule

For comparison, the signaling overhead index is defined as : (total control packet bits) / (total data bits that reach the sink).



Conclusion and Future WorkConclusion and Future Work TreeMAC has following theory properties:

Given any node, at any time slot, there is at most one active sender in its neighborhood (including itself).

The packet scheduling is bufferless, which therefore minimizes the probability of network congestion.

The delivery throughput and delay to gateway is at least 1/3 of the optimum assuming reliable links.

Experiments on a 24 node test bed show that TreeMAC protocol significantly improves network throughput and energy efficiency

Future work Make it compatible with 802.15.4 MAC framework Remove needs of global synchronization.



Thank You for attention!Thank You for attention!

WenZhan [email protected]

http://sensorweb.vancouver.wsu.edu




Cited from http://www.isi.edu/~weiye/talk/SenSys06_SCP.pdf



Experiment parametersExperiment parametersFor comparison, we ported Funneling-MAC from mica2 platform with CC1000 radio to iMote2 platform with CC2420 radio.The only change made is scaling the power level range from [1, 255] for CC1000 to [1, 31] for CC2420.



TreeMAC : Localized TDMA MAC Protocol for Real-time

High-data-rate Sensor Networks

Wen-Zhan Song (WSU) Renjie Huang (WSU)

Behrooz Shirazi (WSU)Richard LaHusen (USGS)

IEEE PerCom 2009 March 11, 2009

*This research is supported by NASA and USGS under grant NNX06AE42G.

TreeMAC : Localized TDMA MAC Protocol for Real-time High-data-rate Sensor Networks

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