End-to-end performance characteristics in energy-aware wireless sensor networks

• Authors: Feng Chen;Falko Dressler;Armin Heindl
• Venue: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM international workshop on Performance evaluation of wireless ad hoc, sensor and ubiquitous networks
• Year: 2006

In this paper, we study end-to-end performance characteristics of S-MAC, an energy-aware medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSN). WSNs are composed of battery-driven communication entities. In order to complete a given task, all sensor nodes, which are deployed in an ad-hoc fashion, have to collaborate by exchanging and forwarding measurement data. S-MAC was proposed to provide an energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. It provides similar features like traditional protocols such as IEEE 802.11. Additionally, new mechanisms were added to allow self-configuration and more energy conservation. The most prominent novel feature is adaptive listening. In this paper, we provide further insight into the behavior of adaptive listening. As opposed to transient experiments on hardware, we study an S-MAC implementation -- adapted from an existing one -- in the network simulator ns-2. We evaluate the steady-state S-MAC performance in multiple simulations, where we apply simulation control techniques. End-to-end performance characteristics, like end-to-end delays and their jitter, are investigated under different load conditions on a multi-hop network. From our results, we conclude that end-to-end behavior in these networks may be very sensitive to load and other conditions and that careful measurements have to be made to ensure a good operating point for WSNs