Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS International Conference on COMMUNICATIONS, Vouliagmeni, Athens, Greece, July 10-12, 2006 (pp260-265)

Analysis of S-MAC/T-MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

WOOCHUL LEE*, YUTAE LEE*, SOONGHEE LEE**, DONGIL KIM*
*Department of Information and Communications Engineering
Dong-Eui University,
996 Eomgwan-no, Busanjin-gu, Busan 614-714, Korea
**Department of Information and Communications Engineering
InJe University
607 Obang-dong, Gimhae, Gyeongnam 621-749, Korea

Abstract: - In this paper, S-MAC(Sensor MAC) is based on the concept of the ‘listen/sleep mode cycle’ and is
single-frequency contention-based protocol for sensor networks. This applies message passing to reduce
contention latency for sensor-network applications that require store-and-forward processing as data moves
through the network. However, unlike the S-MAC, where the duration of the cycle is fixed, T-MAC(Time-out
MAC) introduces an adaptive duty cycle in a novel way: by dynamical ending the active part of it. This reduces the
amount of energy wasted on idle listening, in which nodes wait for potentially incoming messages while still
maintaining a reasonable throughput. The novel idea of the T-MAC protocol is to reduce idle listening by
transmitting all messages in bursts of variable length, and sleeping between bursts. In this paper we discuss the
design of these two Protocols. We analyze them from the aspect of power savings using the OMNET++ simulator
and real environment with MICA Mote2 kit on MIB510 Sensor board with simulation application, Surge-View.

Key-Words: - sensor networks, S-MAC/T-MAC protocol, Energy-Efficiency

1 Introduction Therefore in this paper, we more focus on the

Wireless sensor networks have an additional aspect:
as sensor nodes are generally battery-operated, energy
consumption is very important. And it consists of a
considerable amount of smart sensor nodes with
limited battery life and energy expensive short-range
radio communication. Due to these energy critical
characteristics and high probability of network failure,
wireless sensor networks need an efficient MAC
protocol design. Especially, minimizing power
consumption is a main goal in sensor MAC protocol
design because a power drain of each sensor node can
stop all the necessary functions of sensor networks.
Over the years power-saving issues, therefore, have
received much attention on developing energy
efficient MAC protocols in wireless sensor networks
[1-6]. These protocols can be classified into 2 parts,
schedule-based [3, 4] and contention-based [1, 2, 5, 6].
Schedule-based protocols are naturally energy
preserving in that they have a duty cycle built-in with
an inherent collision-free nature, but they often have
high complexity in design due to a non-trivial problem
of synchronization in wireless sensor networks.
contention-based MAC protocol.
2 S-MAC
S-MAC[1] is a contention-based random access
protocol with a fixed listen/sleep cycle. It uses a
coordinated sleeping mechanism, similar to the power
saving mechanism of IEEE 802.11[7]. A time frame in
S-MAC is divided into two parts: one for a sleeping
session and the other for a listening session (See Fig.
1). Just only for a listen period, sensor nodes are able
to communicate with other nodes and send some
control packets such as SYNC, RTS, and CTS.
The real goal in S-MAC design is to reduce energy
consumption from all the sources that we have
identified to cause energy waste(collision, overhearing,
idle listening, and control overhead) while supporting
good scalability and collision avoidance. To achieve
the design goal, we will discuss the S-MAC that
consists of three major components: periodic listen
and sleep, collision and overhearing avoidance, and
message passing.
Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS International Conference on COMMUNICATIONS, Vouliagmeni, Athens, Greece, July 10-12, 2006 (pp260-265)
2.1 Periodic Sleep and Listen state
Each of nodes in sensor network actually has a
fixed cycle consisting of three different states,
initiation, sleep, and listen. The first step, init state,
when a node is spread into the field, is to initiate and
start its own schedule, and then each node goes to
sleep for some time and then wakes up to listen if any
other node wants to talk to it. So the cycle for
sleep/listen period is repeated until it is switched off
due to its battery life. For the sleep period, the node
turns off its radio, and determine a timer to awake
itself later. All nodes are free to choose their own
listen/sleep schedules. However, to reduce control
overhead, we prefer neighboring nodes to synchronize
together. This means they listen at the same time and
go to sleep concurrently. It should be noticed that not
all neighboring nodes can synchronize together in a
multi-hop network. Nodes broadcast their schedules
to exchange their own for its immediate neighbors.
If there are multiple neighbors, Nodes should
contend for the medium by using RTS (Request To
Send) and CTS (Clear To Send) packets when the
node is listening. The node who first sends out the
RTS packet wins the medium, and the receiver will
reply with a CTS. After they start data transmission,
they do not follow their sleep schedules until they
finish transmission.
2.2 Overhearing Avoidance
In proposed MAC like IEEE 802.11, each node
overhears lots of packets that are not directed to itself.
This is a significant waste of energy, especially when
node density is high and traffic lode is heavy. S-MAC
tries to avoid overhearing by letting interfering nodes
go to sleep after they hear an RTS or CTS packet.
Since DATA packets are normally much longer than
control packets, the approach prevents neighboring
nodes from overhearing long DATA packets and the
following ACKs. Therefore, all immediate neighbors
of both the sender and the receiver should sleep after
they hear the RTS or CTS packet until the current
transmission is over.
2.3 Collision Avoidance
Collision due to multiple senders may occur when
more then two node want to send some packet to same
node in the multi-hop network. So S-MAC adapt the
RTS/CTS mechanism to address the Collision and the
hidden terminal problem[15]. In order to achieve that
mechanism efficiently, it uses the physical and virtual
carrier sensing.
There is a duration field in each transmitted packet
that indicates how long the remaining transmission
will be. So if a node receives a packet destined to
another node, it knows how long it has to keep silent.
The node records this value in an variable called the
network allocation vector (NAV) [1] and sets a timer
for it. Every time when the NAV timer fires, the node
decrements the NAV value until it reaches zero. When
a node has data to send, it first looks at the NAV. If its
value is not zero, the node determines that the medium
is busy. This is called virtual carrier sense.
Physical carrier sense is performed at the physical
layer by listening to the channel for possible
transmissions. The randomized carrier sense time is
very important for collision avoidance. The medium is
determined as free if both virtual and physical carrier
sense indicate that it is free. All senders perform
carrier sense before initiating a transmission.
Broadcast packets are sent without using RTS/CTS.
Unicast packets follow the sequence of
RTS/CTS/DATA/ACK between the sender and the
receiver.
2.4 Message Passing
This subsection describes how to efficiently
transmit a long message. A message can be a long
series of packets, and usually the receiver needs to
obtain all the data units before it can perform
in-network data processing or aggregation. The
disadvantage of transmitting a long message as a
single packet is the high cost of re-transmitting the
long packet if only a few bits have been corrupted in
the first transmission. S-MAC approach is to fragment
the long message into many small fragments, and
transmit them in burst. Only one RTS packet and one
CTS packet are used. They reserve the medium for
transmitting all the fragments. Every time a data
fragment is transmitted, the sender waits for an ACK
from the receiver. If it fails to receive the ACK, it will
extend the reserved transmission time for one more
fragment, and re-transmit the current fragment
immediately. All packets have the duration field,
which is now the time needed for transmitting all the
remaining data fragments and ACK packets. If a
neighboring node hears a RTS or CTS, it will go to
sleep for the time that is needed to transmit all the
fragments. Switching the radio from sleep to active
does not occur instantaneously. Therefore, it is
desirable to reduce the frequency of switching modes.
The message passing scheme tries to put nodes into
sleep state as long as possible, and hence reduces
Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS International Conference on COMMUNICATIONS, Vouliagmeni, Athens, Greece, July 10-12, 2006 (pp260-265)
switching overhead. The purpose of using ACK after
each data fragment is to prevent the hidden terminal
problem. It is possible that a neighboring node wakes
up or a new node joins in the middle of a transmission.
If the node is only the neighbor of the receiver but not
the sender, it will not hear the data fragments being
sent by the sender. If the receiver does not send ACK
frequently, the new node may mistakenly infer from
its carrier sense that the medium is clear. If it starts
transmitting, the current transmission will be
corrupted at the receiver. Each data fragment and
ACK packet also has the duration field. In this way, if
a node wakes up or a new node joins in the middle, it
can properly go to sleep no matter if it is the neighbor
of the sender or the receiver.
2.5 S-MAC problem
S-MAC has the long listen interval, divided into
three parts for SYNC, RTS, and CTS packets,
respectively. The overall listen interval in the current
S-MAC implementation on Mica motes[11]
Fig. 1. shows the basic scheme of the S-MAC
protocol. In this figure, node A wins the competition
for sending out its SYNC packet. Assuming to have
data traffic towards node B in its queue, node A again
wins the competition for sending a RTS packet (Fig.
1(b)). Upon receiving this RTS, node B may
acknowledge to node A with its CTS packet.
Successful exchange of RTS/CTS packets between
two nodes implies that they should stay awake in the
whole sleep period, followed by the current listen
interval, for the completion of their data
communication (i.e., until the next listening
interval).Again, all other nodes that are not involved in
data communication can enter a sleep mode.
Fig. 1. Basic mechanism of S-MAC
Although S-MAC can reduce the idle listening time, it
is not optimal due to a fixed interval of listening mode.
The problem is that, while no nodes have data traffic to
send during some time frame and hence no RTS/CTS
packet transmissions may occur in the corresponding
listen period, every node still has to be awake and just
waste their energies-refer to Fig.1(a).
3 T-MAC
A solution with a fixed duty cycle like the
S-MAC[1] is not optimal. The nodes must be deployed
with an active time that can handle the highest
expected load. And whenever the load is lower than
that, the active time is not optimally used and energy
will be wasted on idle listening.
The idea of the T-MAC[9] protocol is to reduce idle
listening by transmitting all messages in bursts of
variable length, and sleeping between bursts. To
maintain an optimal active time under variable load,
we dynamically determine its length. T-MAC end the
active time in an intuitive way.
3.1 T-MAC Protocol design
Fig. 2 shows the basic scheme of the T-MAC
protocol. Every node periodically wake up to
communicate with its neighbors, and then goes to
sleep again until the next frame. Meanwhile, new
messages are queued. Nodes communicate using a
RTS, CTS and ACK.
A node will keep listening and potentially
transmitting, as long as it is in an active period. An
active period ends when no activation event has
occurred for a time TA. An activation event is “the
periodic frame timer, “the reception of any data on the
radio”, “the end-of-transmission of a node’s own data
packet or acknowledgement”, “the overhearing prior
RTS and CTS packets”. A node will sleep if it is not in
an active period. Consequently, TA determines that
minimal amount of idle listening per frame.
The described timeout scheme moves all
communication to a burst at the beginning of the
frame. Since messages between active times must be
buffered, the buffer capacity determines an upper
bound on the maximum frame time.
3.2 RTS operation and choosing TA
Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS International Conference on COMMUNICATIONS, Vouliagmeni, Athens, Greece, July 10-12, 2006 (pp260-265)
In IEEE 802.11, contention-based protocols, nodes
wait for a random time within a contention interval
after detecting a collision. Usually, a back-off scheme
is used: the contention interval increases when traffic
is higher, because the back-off scheme reduces the
probability of collisions when the load is high.
In the T-MAC protocol, every node transmits its
queued messages in a burst at the start of the frame.
During this burst, the medium is saturated: messages
are transmitted at maximum rate. An increasing
contention interval is not useful, since the load is
mostly high and does not change. Therefore, RTS
transmission in T-MAC starts by waiting and listening
for a random time within a fixed contention interval.
This interval is tuned for maximum load. The
contention time is always used, even if no collision
has occurred yet.
When the sending node receives no answer within
the interval TA, it might go to sleep. However, that
would be wrong in cases 1 and 2: we would then have
a situation where the sending node goes to sleep,
while the receiving node is still awake. Since this
situation might occur even at the first message of the
frame, the throughput dramatically decreases.
Therefore, a node should retry by re-sending the RTS
if it receives no answer. If there is still no reply after
two retries, it should give up and go to sleep.
3.2.1 Determining TA
A node should not go to sleep if its neighbors are
still communicating, since it may be the receiver of a
subsequent message. Receiving the start of the RTS or
CTS packet from a neighbor is enough to trigger a
renewed interval TA. Since a node may not hear,
because it is not in range, the RTS that starts a
communication with its neighbor, the interval TA
must be long enough to receive at least the start of the
CTS packet (Fig. 3). This observation gives us a lower
limit on the length of the interval TA:
TA > C + R + T
where C is the length of the contention interval, R is
the length of an RTS packet, and T is the turn-around
time (i.e. the short time between the end of the RTS
packet and the beginning of the CTS packet). In
T-MAC experiments, TA = 1.5 × (C + R + T), which
proved to be satisfactory. A larger TA increases the
energy used.
3.3 T-MAC Problem
In Fig. 4. Each of the nodes A though D in the
picture forms a cell with its neighbors. Messages flow
from top to bottom, so node A sends only to B, B only
to C, and C only to D. Now consider node C. Every
time it wants to send a message to D, it must contend
for the medium and may loose to either node B (by
receiving an RTS packet) or to node A (indirectly, by
overhearing a CTS packet from node B). If node C
looses contention because of an RTS packet from
node B, it will reply with a CTS packet, which can
also be heard by node D. In that case, node D will be
awake when the communication between C and B
ends. However, if node C looses contention because it
overhears a CTS packet from B to A (see Fig. 4), C
must remain silent. Since D does not know of the
communication between A and B, its active time will
end, and node D will go to sleep. Only at the start of
the next frame will node C have a new chance to send
to node D.
Thus for every packet that node C wants to send to
node D, it may either succeed or fail (by loosing to
node A). Both of these events have equal probability.
Failure implies that the frame ends and C can send no
more packets. We can therefore calculate that, in this
simplified setup, node C has a 50% probability of
sending a single packet to node D, a 25% probability
of sending two packets (it must succeed twice),
etcetera, in each frame. We call the observed effect
the early sleeping problem, since a node goes to sleep
when a neighbor still has messages for it. In the
nodes-to-sink communication pattern, the early
sleeping problem reduced the total possible
throughput of T-MAC to less than half of the
maximum throughput of traditional protocols or
S-MAC. In later experiments, we have also
encountered this problem at the border of a highly
active part of the networks. We believe that the
problem may occur in any asymmetric
communication pattern.
Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS International Conference on COMMUNICATIONS, Vouliagmeni, Athens, Greece, July 10-12, 2006 (pp260-265)
4 Experiments
The purpose of the experiments is to measure the
energy consumption of two protocols: S-MAC,
T-MAC. To evaluate the performance of two
protocols, we use OMNET++ simulator performing
the tests on a simple topology of 10 nodes and 20
nodes. We change the number of nodes in order to
measure energy consumption in different traffic load.
In the Fig. 5 events occur in the network with a
frequency of one per 10 seconds. Events have an
average duration of 5 seconds and affect an area of
approximately 10 nodes. A neighbor that receives one
of these messages replies with a probability of 20%.
We performed multiple measurements, with different
message frequencies during events. This frequency is
on the horizontal axis of the graph (Fig. 5). T-MAC is
using overhearing avoidance but no full-buffer
priority. T-MAC uses much less energy than the
S-MAC, especially when the message frequency
during events increases. However, the maximum
frequency that T-MAC can handle is lower than that
of S-MAC, Thus it may occur that the energy
consumption increases if the traffic load and the
number of nodes is increasing. Again, T-MAC suffers
from the early sleeping problem.
5 Real Implementation on T-MAC
In this section, we use the term power instead of
energy to emphasize that we are talking about actual
electrical characteristics. In strict sense, the terms are
mostly interchangeable : power is energy divided by
time. We also speak of power usage, or energy
consumption, when we should strictly say electrical
current. This is permitted, since the voltage is constant
(joules are consumed at a rate of (I ×3V) per second).
Fig 6 MPR400CB(MICA2),
MPR500CA(MICA2DOT)
We did not implement all features of the T-MAC
protocol onto the MICA2 hardware. To test the
effectiveness of the full-buffer-priority and
future-RTS schemes, a large-scale experiment is
needed, involving a lot of nodes. We have not
implemented the possibility to keep multiple
schedules yet.
Although this is fairly easy to implement, we have
only tested with single-cluster configurations. During
testing, we noted that the nodes’ schedules would drift
apart relatively fast. Even though the time-keeping on
all nodes is based on ticks of a quartz crystal, some of
the nodes became unreachable within as little as 10
minutes. we used a simple correction scheme: when a
node receives a SYNC message that contains almost,
but not exactly, it s own schedule, the node adjusts its
own schedule towards the received schedule. To allow
a converging situation, the schedule is only adjusted
for 50% of the difference between the two schedules.
This paper correction solved the problem: an
experiment showed that nodes were still perfectly
synchronized after more than 10 hours. The final
implementation performs well.
T-MAC setup has the following functions.
1) Adaptive duty-cycle operation on radio
- periodic listen and sleep
2) Broadcast only uses CSMA
3) Many features for uni-cast
- RTS/CTS for hidden terminal problem
- fragmentation support for a long message A long
message is divided (by upper layer) into
multiple fragments. The RTS/CTS reserves the
medium for the entire message. ACK is used for
each fragment for immediate error recovery.
- Node goes to sleep when its neighbors are
talking to other nodes.
5.1 Power usage
After the implementation of the T-MAC protocol,
we performed a number of a power usage experiments.
In these experiments, one node was sending, another
receiving.
Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS International Conference on COMMUNICATIONS, Vouliagmeni, Athens, Greece, July 10-12, 2006 (pp260-265)
Fig 7. Power usage trace idle.
Fig. 8. Power usage trace,
transmitting node, 10 messages / second.
We measured the power consumption of both the
sending and the receiving node. The message length is
20 bytes. The voltage over the resistor is a measure for
the electrical current. This voltage was measured
using Surge View, which is a Java application that
comes standard in the TinyOS Tools distribution. The
Surge View is useful for monitoring a sensor network
and analyzing mesh network performance. At the
computer, we captured the values. After precise
calibration, we could measure the electrical current
through the node with a precision of approximately
15µA.
Fig 7. shows a power usage trace of an idle node.
The power consumption is low most of the time. At
regular intervals (0.61 seconds, the frame time) we see
spikes to 4mA. These are the active times, during
which the radio is on. We also see two higher spikes.
These are SYNC packet transmissions. Fig 8. shows a
close up of a node transmitting 3 messages during a
single frame. We expected that there is no control
packet like RTS/CTS/ACK causing reasonable power
consumptions.
6 Conclusions
In this paper, we have simply focused on the
performance of MAC power consumption[2] and
identified a problem with the T-MAC which saves
energy by turning off the radio as much as possible.
The time-out scheme, as implemented by the T-MAC
protocol, uses significantly less energy than fixed duty
cycle, such as the S-MAC protocol, when applied to
an environment with varying message rates. The exact
advantage depends on the amount of variation in the
message rate. T-MAC protocol can be advantageous,
since it requires no tuning to the specific message rate,
while the S-MAC protocol must be tuned precisely for
optimal energy savings. The performance of
T-MAC[3] under low peak load having a low traffic is
better than the S-MAC in same condition in small
networks.[6] Future work is needed more research on
virtual clustering, both in static and in mobile
networks.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by grant No.
R01-2001-000-00007-0 from the Basic Research
Program of the Korea Science & Engineering
Foundation.
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[17]http://www.chipcon.com/files/CC1000_Data_she
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[18]http://webs.cs.berkeley.edu/retreat-1-04/slides/jo
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