Leistungsbeschränkende Faktoren von MAC und Routingprotokollen in drahtlosen Sensornetzen

The focus of this work lies on the communication issues of Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing protocols in the context of WSNs. The communication challenges in these networks mainly result from high node density, low bandwidth, low energy constraints and the hardware limitations in terms of memory, computational power and sensing capabilities of low-power transceivers. For this reason, the structure of WSNs is always kept as simple as possible to minimize the impact of communication issues. Thus, the majority of WSNs apply a simple one hop star topology since multi-hop communication has high demands on the routing protocol since it increases the bandwidth requirements of the network. Moreover, medium access becomes a challenging problem due to the fact that low-power transceivers are very limited in their sensing capabilities. The first contribution is represented by the Backoff Preamble-based MAC Protocol with Sequential Contention Resolution (BPS-MAC) which is designed to overcome the limitations of low-power transceivers. Two communication issues, namely the Clear Channel Assessment (CCA) delay and the turnaround time, are directly addressed by the protocol. The CCA delay represents the period of time which is required by the transceiver to detect a busy radio channel while the turnaround time specifies the period of time which is required to switch between receive and transmit mode. Standard Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) protocols do not achieve high performance in terms of packet loss if the traffic is highly correlated due to the fact that the transceiver is not able to sense the medium during the switching phase. Therefore, a node may start to transmit data while another node is already transmitting since it has sensed an idle medium right before it started to switch its transceiver from receive to transmit mode. The BPS-MAC protocol uses a new sequential preamble-based medium access strategy which can be adapted to the hardware capabilities of the transceivers. The protocol achieves a very low packet loss rate even in wireless networks with high node density and event-driven traffic without the need of synchronization. This makes the protocol attractive to applications such as structural health monitoring, where event suppression is not an option. Moreover, acknowledgments or complex retransmission strategies become almost unnecessary since the sequential preamble-based contention resolution mechanism minimizes the collision probability. However, packets can still be lost as a consequence of interference or other issues which affect signal propagation. The second contribution consists of a new routing protocol which is able to quickly detect topology changes without generating a large amount of overhead. The key characteristics of the Statistic-Based Routing (SBR) protocol are high end-to-end reliability (in fixed and mobile networks), load balancing capabilities, a smooth continuous routing metric, quick adaptation to changing network conditions, low processing and memory requirements, low overhead, support of unidirectional links and simplicity. The protocol can establish routes in a hybrid or a proactive mode and uses an adaptive continuous routing metric which makes it very flexible in terms of scalability while maintaining stable routes. The hybrid mode is optimized for low-power WSNs since routes are only established on demand. The difference of the hybrid mode to reactive routing strategies is that routing messages are periodically transmitted to maintain already established routes. However, the protocol stops the transmission of routing messages if no data packets are transmitted for a certain time period in order to minimize the routing overhead and the energy consumption. The proactive mode is designed for high data rate networks which have less energy constraints. In this mode, the protocol periodically transmits routing messages to establish routes in a proactive way even in the absence of data traffic. Thus, nodes in the network can immediately transmit data since the route to the destination is already established in advance. In addition, a new delay-based routing message forwarding strategy is introduced. The forwarding strategy is part of SBR but can also be applied to many routing protocols in order to modify the established topology. The strategy can be used, e.g. in mobile networks, to decrease the packet loss by deferring routing messages with respect to the neighbor change rate. Thus, nodes with a stable neighborhood forward messages faster than nodes within a fast changing neighborhood. As a result, routes are established through nodes with correlated movement which results in fewer topology changes due to higher link durations.Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit werden leistungsbeschränkende Faktoren von Medium Access Control (MAC) und Routingprotokollen im Kontext von drahtlosen Sensornetzen untersucht. Zunächst werden typische Probleme des Funkkanals diskutiert. Anschließend führen eine Einteilung von MAC Protokollen, sowie eine Gegenüberstellung relevanter Protokolle in die Thematik ein. Daraufhin werden hardwarelimitierende Faktoren und deren Auswirkung auf die Effizienz von Kanalzugriffsprotokollen untersucht. Des Weiteren wird das vom Autor entwickelte Backoff Preamble-based MAC Protokoll (BPS-MAC) vorgestellt, welches auf die limitierten Fähigkeiten sensortypischer Hardware eingeht und für dichte Sensornetze mit korreliertem Datenverkehr optimiert ist. Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt dieser Arbeit stellt das Thema Routing dar. Hier wird ebenfalls mit einer Einteilung der Protokolle in die Thematik eingeführt. Darüber hinaus werden die wichtigsten Aufgaben von Routingprotokollen vorgestellt. Ein Überblick über häufig verwendete Routingmetriken und Routingprotokolle schließen die Einführung in diesen Themenkomplex ab. Abschließend wird das im Rahmen der Dissertation entwickelte Statistic-Based-Routing (SBR) Protokoll vorgestellt, welches ebenfalls für drahtlose Sensornetze optimiert ist. Der letzte Schwerpunkt beschreibt die Problematik der Leistungsbewertung von Routingprotokollen hinsichtlich klassischer Leistungsparameter wie Paketverlust und Verzögerung. Ebenfalls werden weitere Leistungsparameter wie zum Beispiel die vom Nutzer wahrgenommene Netzqualität genauer untersucht