A Review of Multi-Channel Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are witnessing a momentum spread especially with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Indeed, WSNs are considered as the main enabling infrastructure for IoT networks. Nowadays, the emerging WSNs applications require not only long network lifespan but also considerably high data rate. Consequently, conceiving Multichannel MAC protocols that save the scarceenergy budget of sensor nodes while providing high network throughput is crucial for the emerging WSNs applications. In this paper, a thorough review of recent multichannel MAC protocols is provided along with a classification framework to deeply understand the design aspects for each protocol.

A Comprehensive Survey of Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have emerged as a promising technology for health monitoring due to their high utility and important role in improving human health. WBANs consist of a number of small battery-operated biomedical sensor nodes placed on the body or implanted, which are used to monitor and transmit important parameters such as blood pressure, electrocardiogram (ECG), and electroencephalogram (EEG). WBANs have strict requirements on energy efficiency and reliability during data collection and transmission. The most appropriate layer to address these requirements is the MAC layer. Medium access control protocols play an essential role in controlling the operation of radio transceivers and significantly affect the power consumption of the whole network. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the most relevant and recent MAC protocols developed for WBANs. We discuss design requirements of a good MAC protocol for WBANs. We further review the different channel access mechanisms for WBANs. Then, we investigate the existing designed MAC protocols for WBANs with a focus on their features along with their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we summarize the results of this work and draw conclusions.

An overview of DoSL Attacks in IoT Networks

Many methodologies has been discovered to lower the power consumption in the devices, which is connected to the network in recent years. Many medium access control protocols have been used for low power lossy networks (LLNs).The major goal of introducing this methods is to improve the energy efficiency and to increase the fastness of the communication in the network or the data transmission. The Low power lossy networks is used in many real time scenarios nowadays. These methods use battery-powered devices, which makes transmission easier over lossy links. A particular node generally switches off radio interfaces when no traffic is sent. These devices are made to keep the radio interfaces in ON thus it makes exhausting of batteries causing Denial of sleep attacks. Here, we are going to use time division and channel hoping techniques to get a impact on jamming attacks. We will look on the impacts of such attacks by the ideas got through attacker and to which level the protection allows jamming attacks at upper layers.

Medium Access Control Protocols for Brain Computer Interface Applications

Noteworthy advancements have occurred in the field of brain computer interfaces (BCI) in the last decade. The transmission of the collected signals to the corresponding organ through a wireless link is still in a nascent stage. This paper investigates the feasibility of having multiple UHF-RFID transmitters inside the skull which communicate to the receiver outside. The purpose of this paper is to design a wireless communication channel and enhance the communication using a MAC protocol. The existing MAC protocols were analyzed to be used in a BCI application. Though the combination of existing protocols seems like a possibility to use in a BCI system, the complexity of such a protocol is high. This drawback is overcome by proposing a novel MAC protocol. The performance of the proposed MAC algorithm is related with the widely used Q algorithm for anti-collision in the RFID tags. Parameters like delay and collisions are analyzed in detail which are essential to build a consistent, energy efficient, and a low power BCI system.

Comparative Assessment of the LoRaWAN Medium Access Control Protocols for IoT: Does Listen before Talk Perform Better than ALOHA?

Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) are emerging as appealing solutions for several Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as healthcare, smart cities and Industry 4.0, thanks to their ease of deployment, low energy consumption and large coverage range. LoRaWAN is one of the most successful LPWAN standards, as it supports robust long-distance communications using low-cost devices. To comply with the ETSI regulations, LoRaWAN can adopt as medium access control (MAC) layer either a pure ALOHA approach with duty-cycle limitations or a polite spectrum access technique, such as Listen Before Talk (LBT). The two approaches have their pros and cons that need to be carefully evaluated. The studies in the literature that so far have addressed an evaluation of MAC protocols for LoRaWAN refer to a previous and now obsolete version of the ETSI regulations, therefore they do not take into account the current limits on the timing parameters for polite spectrum access, such as that maximum time an end-node is allowed to be transmitting per hour. For this reason, the contribution of this work is two-fold. First, the paper discusses the restrictions that the current ETSI regulations impose on some timing parameters of the two kinds of MAC protocols for LoRaWAN. Second, the paper provides comparative performance assessments of the two protocols through simulations in realistic scenarios under different workload conditions.