Network coding-aware IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol using batch transmissions and multiple reverse direction exchanges

In this paper we propose a simple relay enabled medium access (SRMAC) protocol that enables cooperative relay transmissions. Due to the wireless signal power attenuation with distance, using a relay in a wireless network can make wireless networking more bandwidth efficient at the expense of requiring multiple transmissions for a single packet. Standard MAC protocols such as the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, while useable with relaying, however are not designed explicitly for relay communication. When IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is used for cooperative communication such a relaying, each packet transmission would need to separately contend for the channel via a channel access procedure which can use significant resources (both energy and bandwidth). Because using a single relay requires two transmissions, an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol that supports two hop transmission is needed. We introduce a protocol, SRMAC, which is a simple cooperative MAC protocol that utilizes information from the physical layer for the MAC operation of relay networks. We consider the bandwidth efficiency of SRMAC protocol considering both the physical layer and MAC layer. The SRMAC protocol includes the possibility of both cooperative transmission and direct transmission. With SRMAC, cooperative transmission (relaying) can be dynamically chosen when it is more beneficial than direct transmission. The SRMAC protocol can improve the throughput by up to 20% compared to conventional MAC protocols.

Power efficient ultra-wideband based wireless communication for wireless body area network applications

In a wireless network consisting of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, they can harvest energy from radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted by Power Beacons (PBs) and consume energy by transmitting data to the Access Point (AP). As the number of devices increases in a network, an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is required to enable devices to transmit data in an energy-efficient manner. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient MAC protocol that operates with devices and backscatter tags that transmit data by reflecting the RF signal. In the proposed network, the AP manages the operation time of PBs after receiving data from devices according to the average amount of remaining energy. The proposed protocol can improve the network throughput and the energy efficiency of devices.

A CDMA mobile system consists of subsystems that transmit and receive call control messages and traffic messages through the CDMA Interconnection Network (CIN). To assure high throughput and short delay in the CIN, an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol should be provided. In this study, we propose a new MAC protocol for CDMA interconnection networks in order to provide real-time communications in CDMA mobile systems. Also, we evaluate the delay performance of the proposed MAC protocol and compare it with that of existing MAC protocol. Through numerical examples, we show that the proposed protocol provides better delay performance than the existing protocol.

Two important criteria of wireless body area networks (WBANs) are low power consumption and delay. These criteria can be met by designing efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols. In this paper, two TDMA-based MAC protocols are proposed. The first protocol, TM–MAC makes use of only a main radio. The second proposed protocol, TWM–MAC makes use of a WUR alongside the main radio. The two proposed protocols are compared with different categories of standard MAC protocols and it is shown that they outperform the standard ones by improving the power consumption and delay. The TWM–MAC consumes 55% less power consumption than the Scheduled Channel Polling MAC (SCP–MAC) protocol for a high traffic scenario on the high-rate platform while the TM-MAC consumes 85% less power consumption than the SCP–MAC. For a low traffic scenario, the TWM–MAC performs 53.5% better than the SCP–MAC protocol and 77.5% better than the very low power MAC (VLPM) protocol on the high and low-rate platforms respectively. An improvement in delay was observed with the TWM–MAC protocol for high traffic situations. The TWM–MAC protocol surpasses the VLPM protocol by 81.1% in terms of latency for a high traffic scenario and 3.2% for a low traffic scenario.

Design of an efficient medium access control protocol is critical for proper functioning of a distributed cognitive radio network and better utilization of the available channels not being used by primary users. In this paper, we design a contention based distributed medium access control (MAC) protocol for the secondary users' channel access. The proposed MAC protocol allows collision-free access of the available channels and eventual utilization by secondary users, with spectrum sensing part being handled by exclusive sensing nodes. The effectiveness of the proposed MAC protocol is evaluated analytically and also through empirical simulations. We show how the protocol performs with respect to blocking probability, channel grabbing, and channel utilization1.

Design of energy efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor network (WSN) containing mobile nodes is a challenging task. Majority of the MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks assume static sensor nodes, which results in poor performance of such protocols in a network containing mobile nodes. In this paper we propose a MAC protocol which is energy efficient as well as suitable for a WSN containing mobile nodes. The proposed protocol is based on both TDMA and CSMA. It adjusts the frame size to adapt to the changes in mobility and traffic conditions. The performance of the proposed protocol has been compared with LEACH-C protocol. It outperforms LEACH-C in terms of average energy consumption, packet delivery ratio and network life time.

In this paper, we consider a simple but efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol that can be used in an ad hoc network with asynchronous multi-channel environments. The approach in our proposal is to use time offset between channels where each channel has its own frame starting time. We assume that the network runs in power saving mode (PSM) of the IEEE 802.11 standard protocol which channel structure consists of beacon frame, ad hoc traffic indication message (ATIM) window, and data window. By asynchronizing beacon frame start times between channels, nodes that have no tasks involved in the current channel can switch to some other channels for more consecutive data transmission trials. Through extensive simulations, we confirm that our multi-channel access scheme results in significant throughput enhancement compared to the conventional access scheme that uses multi-channels in a synchronized manner. Combining our proposal with a power saving scheduling algorithm, we can achieve further throughput improvement. Our analysis and simulation results are used to prove the advantage of our proposals.

Network coding (NC) is a promising technique recently proposed to improve network performance in terms of maximum throughput, minimum delivery delay, and energy consumption. The original proposal highlighted the advantages of NC for multicast communications in wire-line networks. Recently, network coding has been considered as an efficient approach to improve performance in wireless networks, mainly in terms of data reliability and lower energy consumption, especially for broadcast communications. The basic idea of NC is to remove the typical requirement that different information flows have to be processed and transmitted independently through the network. When NC is applied, intermediate nodes in the network do not simply relay the received packets, but they combine several received packets before transmission. As a consequence, the output flow at a given node is obtained as a linear combination of its input flows. This chapter deals with the application of network coding principle at different communications layers of the protocol stack, specifically, the Medium Access Control (MAC) and physical (PHY) Layers for wireless communication networks.

Network coding (NC) and erasure coding (EC) share a common principle of encoding incoming data packets at network intermediate nodes so that destination nodes can reconstruct the original data packets using a sufficient number of encoded data packets collected at the destinations. While NC in general reduces the number of packets sent through the network, EC introduces redundancy into the packet streams to recover from lost packets. Many research papers in NC assume loss-free packet transmission, and to address this issue, end-to-end packet loss recovery through EC has been proposed. In this paper, we investigate hop-by-hop packet loss recovery through EC so as to avoid the accumulation of lost packets throughout the network using flow oriented EC. Specifically, we explore combined NC and EC at intermediate nodes in the networks to allow for improved packet loss recovery compared to end-to-end EC. Different implementations trading the packet processing complexity at the intermediate and destination nodes are considered. This paper first examines the effects of data loss in NC and then the improvements achievable with the proposed method are presented.

International audience

The industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) depends on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to enable low‐power, low‐data‐rate communication in resource‐limited settings. While the IEEE 802.15.4 standard provides the communication foundation, its medium access control (MAC) protocols face challenges including energy consumption, latency, scalability, and adaptability. Traditional MAC protocols cannot keep up with the demands of IIoT networks as the number of connected devices continues to increase. Therefore, edge artificial intelligence (Edge AI) and tiny machine learning (TinyML) represent emerging approaches that show potential for improving the performance of traditional MAC protocols directly on IIoT devices. Edge AI and TinyML allow intelligent decision‐making at the edge, which enables efficient data processing and adaptability to the environment without the need for cloud infrastructure, which may reduce latency and energy consumption. This paper systematically examines the emerging paradigm of combining Edge AI and TinyML to improve MAC protocols for WSNs in IIoT networks. We explore advanced machine learning (ML) methods applicable to resource‐limited devices, and we investigate how these methods can improve key performance metrics for MAC protocols, including energy efficiency, throughput, and network lifetime. We also discuss the challenges and limitations of applying AI solutions in WSNs, including computational constraints, data scarcity, and model scalability. Finally, we propose potential future research directions to improve the application of AI and ML techniques to develop more efficient, adaptive, and intelligent MAC protocols for future IIoT networks.

We present in this paper an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol called iCSMA/CD for improving the efficiencies of optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks. The key idea behind the design of iC-SMA/CD is similar to the well-known Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) MAC protocol for the Ethernet, in the sense that both use the CD technique to resolve contentions for the carrier. However, our proposed protocol is unique in that it exploits some look-ahead method for achieving better delay-throughput performance. Simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the delay-throughput performance of a WDM ring network controlled by the proposed iCSMA/CD protocol and the results demonstrate the impressive advantages of iCSMA/CD.

In the realm of underwater wireless communication, vast oceanic expanses often demand large-scale deployment of Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs). UWSNs rely on acoustic communication channels, presenting distinct challenges like prolonged propagation delays, restricted bandwidth, and dynamic topologies. Furthermore, the far-reaching and multi-path nature of acoustic signals results in significant hidden terminal problems and ubiquitous interference between neighboring nodes. Therefore, an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol is crucial for optimizing UWSN performance. This article proposes IC-MAC, a MAC protocol tailored for UWSNs to avoid collisions and improve network performance. IC-MAC employs distributed clustering to group sensor nodes and the cluster head degree is defined for each node, which is a coefficient that accentuates nodes characterized by a higher incidence of collision associations. To identify interfering nodes and construct an interference-free graph, an interference identification algorithm is proposed. In addition, a heuristic graph coloring technique, guided by particle swarm optimization, allocates time slots efficiently to achieve collision-free transmission scheduling and enhanced spatial reuse. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the IC-MAC protocol in enhancing throughput, reducing delay, and improving packet delivery ratio and energy efficiency. This is achieved through efficient spatial resource utilization and robust management of collisions and interference, specifically tailored for underwater acoustic channels, outperforming existing MAC protocols.

Network coding has been shown to be a very promising technique for increasing the throughput in wireless ad hoc networks. In this paper, we set to define simple extensions for distributed medium access control (MAC) protocols that optimize the transmission of network-coded packets independently of the actual network coding algorithm. The main characteristic of the proposed protocol is that it improves the efficiency of coding decisions and allows verifying the decodability of packets before they are transmitted. The aforementioned goals are achieved first by adopting minor extensions to the channel access scheme, and second by introducing a new algorithm that manages intelligently the data packets that are stored at the MAC queue of each network node. The later algorithm improves the knowledge of a node regarding the available correct coding opportunities by the use of opportunistic acknowledgments, and by maintaining virtual buffers for the overheard data packets. For the proposed protocol, we also develop an analytical performance model that is used for evaluating its performance in conjunction with simulations. Extensive simulations are presented for several ad hoc network topologies that test all the features of the proposed protocol. Significant throughput improvement can be observed when our protocol is compared with network coding schemes that do not exploit the full potential of opportunistic listening.