Title: Multi-radio medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Authors: Junaid Ansari, Xi Zhang, Petri Mahonen

Addresses: Institute for Networked Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Kackertstrasse 9, D-52072, Aachen, Germany. ' Institute for Networked Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Kackertstrasse 9, D-52072, Aachen, Germany. ' Institute for Networked Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Kackertstrasse 9, D-52072, Aachen, Germany

Abstract: This paper describes a dual-radio based medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks. Our protocol combines the advantages of the two radios operating in different frequency bands to result in highly energy-efficient operation. The design effectively addresses the two dominant sources of energy consumption in sensor network communication, namely the idle listening and the ephemeral burst data traffic. This paper presents the design rationale and extensive empirical performance evaluation of the protocol in terms of power consumption and latency under various traffic loads and duty cycles. Experimental performance comparison with B-MAC show high gains of our approach. We derive analytical expression for the optimum transmit power level ratio of the two radios giving minimum energy consumption. We also model the mathematical relationship for the optimal duty cycle of the nodes to a given network traffic load and validate it through the prototype implementation on commercially available sensor nodes.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; WSNs; multi-radio MAC; low power; multi-radio platforms; performance evaluation; medium access control; wireless networks; energy efficiency; idle listening; ephemeral burst data traffic; power consumption; latency.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2010.034066

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2010 Vol.8 No.1, pp.47 - 61

Received: 04 Sep 2009
Accepted: 20 Jan 2010
Published online: 07 Jul 2010 *

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