A wireless body area sensor network (WBASN) demands ultra low power and energy efficient protocols. Medium access control (MAC) layer plays a pivotal role for energy management in WBASN. Moreover, idle listening is the dominant energy waste in most of the MAC protocols. WBASN exhibits wide range of traffic variations based on different physiological data emanating from the monitored patient. For example, electrocardiogram data rate is multiple times more in comparison with body temperature rate. In this context, we propose a novel energy efficient traffic-aware dynamic (TAD) MAC protocol for WBASN. The protocol relies on dynamic adaptation of wake-up interval based on a traffic status register bank. The proposed technique allows the wake-up interval to converge to a steady state for fixed and variable traffic rates, which results in optimized energy consumption. A comparison with other energy efficient protocols for three different widely used radio chips i.e., cc2420, cc1000, and amis52100 is presented. The results show that TAD-MAC outperforms all the other protocols under fixed and variable traffic rates. Finally, life- time of a WBASN was estimated and found to be 3-6 times better than other protocols.

In wireless distributed networks, cooperative relay and cooperative multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques can be used to exploit the spatial and temporal diversity gains to increase the performance or reduce the transmission energy consumption. The energy efficiency of cooperative MIMO and relay techniques is then very useful for the infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) and infrastructure-to-infrastructure (I2I) communications in intelligent transport system (ITS) networks, where the energy consumption of wireless nodes embedded on road infrastructure is constrained. In this paper, applications of cooperation between nodes to ITS networks are proposed, and the performance and the energy consumption of cooperative relay and cooperative MIMO are investigated and compared with the traditional multihop technique. The comparison between these cooperative techniques helps us choose the optimal cooperative strategy in terms of energy consumption for energy-constrained road infrastructure networks in ITS applications.

To overcome the limited energy in battery-powered wireless sensor networks (WSNs), harvested energy is considered as a potential solution to achieve autonomous systems. A power manager (PM) is usually embedded in wireless nodes to adapt the computation load by changing their wake-up interval according to the harvested energy. In order to prolong the network lifetime, the PM must ensure that every node satisfies the energy neutral operation (ENO) condition. However, when a multi-hop network is considered, changing the wake-up interval regularly may cripple the synchronization among nodes and, therefore, degrade the global system quality of service. In this paper, a wake-up variation reduction PM is proposed to solve this issue. This PM is applied for wireless nodes powered by a periodic energy source (e.g., light energy in an office) over a constant cycle of 24 h. Our PM not only follows the ENO condition, but also reduces the wake-up interval variations of WSN nodes. Based on this PM, an energy-efficient protocol, named synchronized wake-up interval MAC, is also proposed. OMNET++ simulation results using three different harvested profiles show that the data rate of a WSN node can be increased up to 65% and the latency reduced down to 57% compared with state-of-the-art PMs. Validations on a real WSN platform have also been performed and confirmed the efficiency of our approach.

Opportunistic forwarding has emerged as a promising technique to address the problem of unreliable links typical in wireless sensor networks and improve energy efficiency by exploiting multiuser diversity. Timer-based solutions, such as timer-based contention, form promising schemes to allow opportunistic next hop relay selection. However, they can incur significant idle listening and thus reduce the lifetime of the network. To tackle this problem, we propose to exploit emerging wake-up receiver technologies that have the potential to considerably reduce the power consumption of wireless communications. A careful design of MAC protocols is required to efficiently employ these new devices. In this work, we propose Opportunistic Wake-Up MAC (OPWUM), a novel multihop MAC protocol using timer-based contention. It enables the opportunistic selection of the best receiver among its neighboring nodes according to a given metric (e.g., the remaining energy), without requiring any knowledge about them. Moreover, OPWUM exploits emerging wake-up receivers to drastically reduce nodes power consumption. Through analytical study and exhaustive networks simulations, we show the effectiveness of OPWUM compared to the current state-of-the-art protocols using timer-based contention. Opportunistic forwarding has emerged as a promising technique to address the problem of unreliable links typical in wireless sensor networks and improve energy efficiency by exploiting multiuser diversity. Timer-based solutions, such as timer-based contention, form promising schemes to allow opportunistic next hop relay selection. However, they can incur significant idle listening and thus reduce the lifetime of the network. To tackle this problem, we propose to exploit emerging wake-up receiver technologies that have the potential to considerably reduce the power consumption of wireless communications. A careful design of MAC protocols is required to efficiently employ these new devices. In this work, we propose Opportunistic Wake-Up MAC (OPWUM), a novel multihop MAC protocol using timer-based contention. It enables the opportunistic selection of the best receiver among its neighboring nodes according to a given metric (e.g., the remaining energy), without requiring any knowledge about them. Moreover, OPWUM exploits emerging wake-up receivers to drastically reduce nodes power consumption. Through analytical study and exhaustive networks simulations, we show the effectiveness of OPWUM compared to the current state-of-the-art protocols using timer-based contention.