Smart Sensors and Sensor Networks

Lecture 4
Physical layer, MAC and
link layer protocols

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Physical layer
 Physical layer: the functions and components of a sensor node that
mediate between the transmission and reception of wireless signals
and the processing of data, including the higher – level protocol
processing;
 The physical layer is concerned with modulation and demodulation

of digital data; this is carried by the transceivers;

 In SNs, the challenge is to find modulation schemes and transceiver

architectures that are simple, low cost, but still robust enough to
provide the desired service;
Wireless channel and communication fundamentals
 Wireless channels are an unguided medium;

 Frequency allocation:

 In RF based systems, the carrier frequency has to be carefully chosen;

the carrier frequency determines the propagation characteristics, such as
how well are obstacles penetrated and the available capacity;
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 The existing frequency bands:

 Other solutions are infrared and optical communications:

 The infrared spectrum is between wavelengths of 1 mm to 2.5 μm (300 GHz
to 120 THz);
 The optical spectrum ends at 780 nm (≈ 385 THz);
 Most of today’s RF based systems work at frequencies below 6 GHz; the
allocation of radio frequencies is governed by regulations to avoid
unwanted interference;
 Some systems have special licenses for reserved bands: in Europe,
GSM systems use the GSM 900 (880 – 915 MHz) and GSM 1800 (1700
– 1785 MHz) bands;

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 There are also license free bands, the ISM bands:

 In the public ISM bands, any system has to coexist with other systems,
meaning they have to be robust against interferences:
 Coexistence needs to be approached both on the physical and the MAC layer;
 Requesting allocation of some exclusive spectrum is time consuming;
 An important parameter in a transmission system is the antenna
efficiency, defined as the ratio of the radiated power to the total input of
the antenna; the remaining power is dissipated as heat;
 Small dimensions are required in case of sensors but this is difficult even
at high frequencies;

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 Modulation and demodulation
 Groups of symbols (data) are mapped to one of a finite number of
waveforms of the same finite length; with two different waveforms, a
binary modulation results; m – ary modulation;
 The mapping from a received waveform to symbols is called
demodulation;
 The most common form of modulation is the bandpass modulation:
 The information signal is modulated onto a periodic carrier wave of
comparably high frequency;
 The spectrum used is typically described by a center frequency f c and a
bandwidth B and most of the signal energy can be found in the frequency
range: [fc – B/2, fc + B/2];
 The carrier is typically represented as a cosine wave, uniquely determined by
amplitude, frequency and phase shift;
 As a consequence modulated signal s(t) can be represented as:
s(t) = A(t) cos(ω(t) + Ф(t))
 Accordingly, there are 3 fundamental modulation types: ASK, PSK and FSK;

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 Wave propagation effects and noise:

 Waveforms transmitted over wireless channels are subject to several physical
phenomena that distort the waveform; this introduces bit errors at the receiver;
 The basic wave propagation phenomena are:
 Reflection: when a waveform propagating in medium A hits the boundary to
another medium B and the boundary layer is smooth, one part of the
waveform is reflected back into medium A, another one is transmitted into
medium B and the rest is absorbed;
 Diffraction: all points on a wavefront can be considered as sources of a new
wavefront; if a waveform hits a sharp edge, it can be propagated into another
region;

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 Scattering: when a waveform hits a rough surface, it can be reflected multiple
times and diffused into many directions;
 Doppler fading: when a transmitter and a receiver move relative to each other,
the waveforms experience a shift in frequency, according to the Doppler
effect; if the shift is important, this can cause the receiver to sample signals at
wrong frequencies;

 The signal at the receiver is a superposition of multiple and delayed

copies of the same signal; the copies have different relative delays,
which translate for each frequency component of the signal into different
relative phase shifts at the receiver; it results destructive or constructive
interference, leading to fading of the signal;

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 Path loss and attenuation:
 The received power at a distance of d ≥ d0 m between transmitter and receiver
is described by the Friis free – space equation:

 For environments other than free space, the model is generalized:

Prcvd(d) = Prcvd(d0) x (d0/d)γ, where γ is the path – loss exponent ε [2, 6]
 The path loss is defined as the ratio of the radiated power to the received
power, Ptx/Prcvd(d) and is expressed in decibel as:
PL(d)[dB] = PL(d0)[dB] + 10γlog10(d/d0)
 Conclusions:
 The received power depends on the frequency: the higher the frequency, the lower
the received power;
 The received power depends on the distance according to a power of law; for
example, assuming a path – loss exponent of 2, a node at a distance of 2d to some
receiver must spent 4 times the energy of a node at distance d to the same receiver,
to reach the same level of received power P rvcd;
 Higher frequencies or larger distances must be compensated by an appropriate
increase in transmitted power to maintain a specified Prcvd(d) value;
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 Attenuation is determined by the media (for example fog or rain); it is
frequency – dependent; usually is accounted for in the path – loss exponent;
 Noise and interference:
 Interference refers to the presence of any unwanted signals from external
sources, which obscure or mask a signal;
 Multiple – access interference: when the signals come from transmitters sending in
the same band at the same time;
 Co – channel interference: the interference sources radiates in the same or in an
overlapping frequency band as the transmitter and receiver under consideration;
 Adjacent – channel interference: the interferer works in a neighboring band;
 The noise (or thermal noise) is caused by thermal motions of electrons in any
conducting media; it is typically measured by the single – sided noise Power
Spectral Density, N0, given by:
N0 = K x T [watts/hertz], where K = Boltzmanns constant (≈ 1.38x10-23 J/K), T
= temperature in Kelvin degrees;
 The thermal noise is additive, that is, the received signal r(t) is a sum of the
transmitted signal s(t), arrived at the receiver after path loss, attenuation,
scattering and so forth, and the noise signal, n(t):
r(t) = s(t) + n(t)

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 Symbols and bit errors:
 The symbol/ error probability depends on the modulation scheme and on the
ratio of the power of the received signal, P rcvd, to the noise and interference
power; when only the thermal noise is considered, the ratio is (in decibels):
N0 is the noise power and Prcvd is the
average received signal power;
 When other sources of interference are considered too:

Ii is the power received from the i – th

interferer;
 The SINR describes the power that arrives at the receiver and is related to the
symbols sent over the channel; in the end, the data bits are relevant; to
correctly demodulate and decode an arriving bit, the energy per such a bit E b
in relation to the noise energy N0 is relevant:

 The bandwidth efficiency, ηBW = R/W, is a measure of a modulation scheme’s

efficiency:

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 Spread – spectrum communications:
 In spread – spectrum systems, the bandwidth occupied by the
transmitted waveforms is much larger than what would be really needed
to transmit the given user data;
 The user signal is spread at the transmitter and dispread at the receiver;
 By using a wideband signal, the effects of narrowband noise/
interference are reduced;
 Spread – spectrum systems offer an increased robustness against
multipath effects but the receiver operation is more complex;
 There are 2 types of spread – spectrum communications:

 Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum: the transmission of a data bit is replaced by

transmission of a finite chip sequence c = c 1c2…cn or /c1/c2…/cn with ci ε {0,1};
 Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum: the available spectrum is divided into a
number of equal – sized sub bands or channels (for example Bluetooth divide the
spectrum in the 2.4 GHz range in 78 sub bands 1 MHz wide; the user data is always
transmitted within one channel at a time; all nodes in a network hop synchronously
through the channels according to a prespecified schedule; different networks can
share the same geographic area by using no overlapping hopping schemes;

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 Packet transmission and synchronization:
 The MAC layer uses packets or frames as the basic unit of transmission;
 The receiver must know certain properties of an incoming waveform to
understand it and to detect a frame: synchronization becomes necessary
due to the drift of the oscillators;
 To compensate this drift, the receiver has to learn about the frequency or
time base of the transmitter; the receiver has to extract synchronization
information from the incoming waveform;
 Frames must be equipped with a training sequence that allows the
receiver to learn about the parameters of the transmitter; the training
sequence can be placed at the beginning of frames or in the middle;
 After the receiver has successfully acquired initial synchronization from
the training sequence, it enters a tracking mode, continuously readjusting
its local oscillator;
 Synchronization is needed at: carrier (frequency correction bursts are
used), bit/symbol (the coding technique is important) and frame (frame
bounds must be detected) levels;

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Physical layer and transceiver design considerations in WSNs:
 Some of the most crucial points influencing PHY design in WSNs
are:
 Low power consumption;
 Consequence 1: small transmit power and thus a small transmission range;
 Consequence 2: low duty cycle; most hardware should be switched off or
operated in a low power standby mode most of the time;
 Low data rates (tens to hundreds kb/s);
 Low implementation complexity and costs;
 Low degree of mobility;
 A small form factor for the overall node;
 Low cost;
 Energy usage profile:
 The radiated energy is small but the overall transceiver consumes much
more energy than is actually radiated; for ex. for the Mica motes, 21 mW
are consumed in transmit mode and 15 mW in received mode for a
radiated power of 1 mW;
 For small transmit powers the transmit and receive modes consume
more or less the same power; therefore it is important to put the
transceiver into sleep state instead of idle state;

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 This rises the problem of startup energy/ startup time which a transceiver
has to spend upon waking up from sleep mode, for example, to ramp up
phase – locked loops or voltage – controlled oscillators; during this
startup time, no transfer of data is possible; for example, the μAMPS-1
transcveiver needs 466 μs and a power dissipation of 58 mW; therefore,
going into sleep mode is unfavorable when the next wakeup comes fast;
 Computation is cheaper than communication: the ratio is hundreds to
thousands of instructions/ 1 transmitted bit;
 Choice of modulation scheme:
 The choice of modulation scheme depends on several aspects, including
technological factors, packet size, target error rate and channel error
model;
 The power consumption of a modulation scheme depends much more on
the symbol rate than on the data rate; it leads to desire of high data rates
at low symbol rates which ends to m – ary modulation schemes; trade –
offs:
 M – ary modulation schemes require more hardware than 2 – ary schemes;
 M – ary modulation schemes require for increasing m an increased E b/N0 ratio;
 Generally, in WSN applications most packets are short; for them, the startup time
dominates overall energy consumption making the other efforts irrelevant;

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 Dynamic modulation scaling is necessary;
 Antenna considerations:
 The small form factor of the overall sensor restricts the size and the
number of antennas;
 If the antenna is much smaller than the carrier’s wavelength, it is hard to
achieve good antenna efficiency and transmitted energy must increase;
 In case of multiple antennas, they should be spaced apart at least 40 –
50% of the wavelength used to achieve good effects; for ex. for 2.4 GHz,
a spacing of 5 – 6 cm between the antennas is necessary, which is
difficult to be accepted;
 Radio waves emitted from antennas close to the ground, typical in some
applications, are faced with higher path – loss coefficients than the
common value of α = 2; a typical value, considering the obstacles too, is
α = 4;
 Nodes randomly scattered on the ground, deployed from an aircraft, will
land in random orientations, with the antennas facing the ground or being
otherwise obstructed; this can lead to nonisotropic propagation of the
radio wave, with considerable differences in the strength of the emitted
signal in different directions.

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MAC layer protocols

 The fundamental task of any MAC protocol is to regulate the access
of a number of nodes to a shared medium in such a way that certain
application – dependent performance requirements are satisfied;
 For WSNs, the main requirement is energy efficiency and there are
MAC – specific sources of energy waste to consider: overhearing,
collisions, overhead and idle listening; protocols address one or
more of these issues;
 Within the OSI reference model, the MAC is considered as part of
the Data Link Layer (DLL) but it is a clear division of work between
the MAC and the remaining parts of the DLL;
 The remaining part of the DLL approaches error and flow control:
 Error control ensures correctness of transmission and to take
appropriate actions in case of errors;
 Flow control regulates the rate of transmission to protect a slow receiver
from being overwhelmed with data;

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Fundamentals of MAC protocols
 Requirements and design constraints for wireless MAC protocols:

 Traditionally, the most important performance requirements for MAC

protocols are throughput efficiency, stability, fairness, low access delay,
low transmission delay, low overhead;
 The overhead can result from per – packet overhead, collisions or from
exchange of extra control packets;
 The operation and performance of MAC protocols is heavily influenced
by the properties of the underlying physical layer;
 The problems of wireless transmission influences the MAC protocols; one
problem is the time – variable and sometimes high error rates, which is
caused by physical phenomena like fading, path loss, attenuation and noise;
 Usually the bit error rates can vary between 10 -3 and 10-2;
 The fact that the received power Prcvd decreases with the distance
between transmitting and receiving node, combined with the fact that any
transceiver needs a minimum signal strength to demodulate signals,
leads to a maximum range that a sensor node can reach with a given
transmit power;

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 If 2 nodes are out of reach, they cannot hear each other; this rises the
hidden – terminal/ exposed – terminal problems:
 The problems occur for the class of Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA)
protocols, where a node senses the medium before starting to transmit a
packet; if the medium is found to be busy, the node defers its packet to avoid
a collision and a subsequent transmission;
 Simple CSMA in a hidden – terminal scenario leads to needless collisions;

 Simple CSMA in an exposed – terminal scenario leads to needless waiting;

 The solutions are: busy – tone solutions and the RTS/CTS handshake used in
the IEEE 802.11 WLAN standard;

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 On the wired media, it is often possible for the transmitter to detect a
collision at the receiver and to abort packet transmission; this is called
collision detection (CD); collision detection protocols are not applicable in
wireless media;
 Another problem arises when there is no dedicated frequency band
allocated to a WSN and it has to share the spectrum with other systems;
for ex. the ISM bands are used by several systems, such as IEEE
802.11/ IEEE 802.11b WLANs, Bluetooth and IEEE 802.15.4 WPANs;
therefore, WSNs must coexist with other systems;
 The design of MAC protocols depends on the expected traffic load
patterns:
 If a WSN is deployed to continuously observe a physical phenomenon, for
example, the time – dependent temperature distribution in a forest, a
continuous and low load with a significant fraction of periodic traffic can be
expected;
 If the goal is to wait the occurrence of an important event and to report
immediately as much data as possible, the network is close to idle for a long
time and then is faced with a bulk of packets that are to be delivered quickly; a
high MAC efficiency is desirable during these overload phases;

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 Important classes of MAC protocols: they can be divided in:
 Fixed assignment protocols:
 The available resources are divided between the nodes for long term and
each node can use its resources exclusively without the risk of collisions;
 To account for changes in the topology, signaling mechanisms are needed to
renegotiate the assignment of resources;
 Demand assignment protocols:
 The exclusive allocation of resources to nodes is made on a short – term
basis, typically the duration of a data burst; they are divided in centralized and
distributed protocols;
 In centralized protocols a central node receives requests and allocates resources;
 A distributed protocol example is the IEEE 802.4 Token Bus;
 Random access protocols:
 The nodes are uncoordinated and the protocols operate in a fully distributed
manner; for example, in the ALOHA protocol, a node wanting to transmit a
new packet does it immediately, accepting the risk of collisions at the receiver;
the receiver is required to send an immediate acknowledgement for a properly
received packet; if the transmitter does not receives the ack. it tries a
retransmission after a random time;

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MAC protocols for WSNs
 Requirements:
 New requirements are imposed by WSNs, the main one being the
energy efficiency;
 Typical performance figures like fairness, throughput or delay have a
minor role in SNs; fairness is not important since the nodes in a WSN do
not represent individuals competing for bandwidth, but they collaborate
to achieve a common goal;
 Other important requirements:
 Scalability: is obvious when considering very dense sensor networks with
dozens or hundreds of nodes in mutual range;
 Robustness against frequent topology changes: are caused by nodes
powering down temporarily to replenish their batteries by energy scavenging,
mobility, deployment of new nodes or death of existing nodes;
 Low complexity operation:
 Sensor nodes are simple, cheap and have limited hardware resources; therefore
computational expensive operations like complex scheduling algorithms should be
avoided;
 Very tight time synchronization would require frequent resynchronization of
neighboring nodes, which can consume significant energy;

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 Energy problems on the MAC layer:
 Transmitting is costly, receive costs often are as transmit costs, idling
can be cheaper but also about as expensive as receiving and sleeping
costs almost nothing but results in a deaf node;
 The following energy problems are related to MAC protocols:
 Collisions: incur useless receive costs at the destination node, useless
transmit costs at the source node and expending energy upon packet
retransmission; collisions should be avoided either by design or by
appropriate collision avoidance/ hidden – terminal procedures in CSMA;
however, for applications with low load, the collisions are a minor problem;
 Overhearing: the wireless medium is broadcast type and all the sources’
neighbors that are in receive state hear a packet and drop it even if it is not
destined to them; they overhear the packet; overhearing costs energy;
overhearing can be desirable, for example, when collecting neighborhood
information or estimating the current traffic load for management purposes;
 Protocol overhead: is induced by MAC – related control frames (RTS and CTS
packets, request packets in some protocols, per – packet overhead etc.);
 Idle listening: a node in idle state still consumes energy; switching off is a
solution; since mode change costs energy, the rate of change is important;

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 Low duty cycle protocols and wakeup concepts:
 Low duty cycle protocols try to avoid spending much time in the idle state
and to reduce the communication activities of a sensor node to a
minimum;
 In an ideal case, the sleep state is left only when a node is about to
transmit or receive packets;
 In several protocols, a periodic wakeup scheme is used; one flavor is the
cycled receiver approach:

 A node A listens onto the channel during its listen period and goes back into
sleep mode when no other node communicates with it;
 A potential transmitter B must know about A’s listen periods and send its
packet at the right time; this is a so-called rendezvous;
 A rendezvous can be implemented by letting node A to send a beacon at the
beginning of its listen period or letting node B to send frequent request
packets until one of them is sensed by node A;
 If node A wants to send a packet, it must also know the target’s listen period;

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 A wakeup period = sleep period + listen period;
 The node’s duty cycle = listen period/ wakeup period;
 Observations:
 By choosing a small duty cycle, the transceiver is in sleep mode most of the
time, avoiding idle listening and conserving energy;
 By choosing a small duty cycle, the traffic directed from neighboring nodes to
a given node concentrates on a small time window (the listen period) and in
heavy load situations significant competition can occur;
 Choosing a long sleep period induces a significant per – hop latency, since a
prospective transmitter node has to wait an average of half a sleep period
before the receiver can accept packets; in the multihop case, the per – hop
latencies add up and create significant end – to – end latencies;
 Sleep phases should not be too short lest the start – up costs outweigh the
benefits;
 In other protocols, there is also a periodic wakeup but nodes can both
transmit and receive during their wakeup phases; when all nodes have
their wakeup phases at the same time, there is no need for a
rendezvous;

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 Wakeup radio concepts:
 The ideal situation is to avoid idle state;
 A wakeup receiver is necessary: it does not need power but can detect when
a packet starts to arrive; for example it suffices for it to raise an event to notify
other components of an incoming packet; upon such an event, the main
receiver can be turned on and perform the reception of the packet;
 The wakeup radio concept tries to attend the ideal situation by using the
wakeup receiver idea;
 One of the proposed MAC protocol assumes the presence of several parallel
data channels, separated either in frequency (FDMA) either in codes (CDMA);
a node wishing to transmit a data packet randomly picks one of the channels
and performs a carrier – sensing operation; if the channel is busy, the
operation is repeated; after a certain number of tries the node backs off for a
random time and starts again; if the channel is idle, the node sends a wakeup
signal to the receiver indicating also the channel to use; the receiver wakes up
its main data receiver, tunes to the indicated channel and data transfer can
proceed; afterwards, the main receiver is sent back to its sleep mode;
 Advantages:
 Only the low – power wakeup transceiver has to be switched on all the time;
 The scheme is naturally traffic adaptive; the MAC is more and more active as the
traffic load increases;
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 Disadvantages:
 Difficult hardware solution for such an ultralow power wakeup receiver;
 The range of the wakeup radio and the data radio should be the same; if the range
of the wakeup radio is smaller than the range of the data radio, possibly not all
neighbor nodes can be woken up; if the range of the wakeup radio is significantly
larger, there can be a problem with local addressing schemes: these schemes do not
use globally or networkwide – unique addresses but only locally unique addresses,
such that no node has two or more one – hop neighbors with the same address; on
the other hand, a node’s MAC address should be unique within its two – hop
neighborhood; since the packets exchanged in the neighbor discovery phase have to
use the data channel, the two – hop neighborhood as seen on the data channel
might be different from the two – hop neighborhood on the wakeup channel;
 This schemes critically relies on the wakeup channel’s ability to transport useful
information like node addresses and channel identifications; this might not always be
feasible for transceiver complexity reasons and additionally requires methods to
handle collisions and transmission errors on the wakeup channel; if the wakeup
channel does not support this feature, the transmitter wakes up all its neighbors
when it emits a wakeup signal, creating an overhearing situation for most of them; if
the transmitting node is about to transmit a long data packet, it might be worthwhile
to prepend the data packet with a short filter packet announcing the receiving node’s
address; all the other nodes can go back to sleep mode after receiving the filter
packet; instead of using an extra packet, all nodes can read the bits of the data
packet until the destination address and if this address is not identical with its own
address, the node can go back into sleep mode;

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 Contention – based protocols
 A given transmit opportunity towards a receiver node can in principle be
taken by any of its neighbors;
 If only one neighbor tries its luck, the packet goes through the channel; if
several neighbors try their luck, these have to compete with each other
and in unlucky case, for example due to hidden – terminal situations, a
collision might occur, wasting energy for both transmitter and receiver;
 Contention – based protocols:
 Based on a periodic wakeup scheme;
 Without idle listening avoidance and without restrictions as to when a node
can receive a packet;
 Contention – based protocols are appropriate in case of a network that is
idle for long times and starts to become active when triggered by an
important external event; upon the triggering event, all nodes wish to
transmit simultaneously, potentially creating lots of collisions; if the nodes
want to send their packets periodically, the danger of collision is
repeated;

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 Schedule – based protocols
 Advantages:
 They do not explicitly address idle listening avoidance but do so implicitly, for
example schemes that explicitly assign transmission and reception
opportunities to nodes and let them sleep all other times;
 Transmission schedules can be computed such that no collisions occur at
receivers and hence no special mechanisms are needed to avoid hidden –
terminal situations;
 Disadvantages:
 The setup and maintenance of schedules involves signaling traffic, especially
when faced with variable topologies;
 If a TDMA variant is employed, time is divided in small slots and both
transmitter and receiver have to agree to slot boundaries to actually meet
each other to avoid overlaps with other slots, which would lead to collisions;
maintaining time synchronization involves extra signaling traffic; for cheap
sensors, having cheap oscillators, it is expected large drifts leading to
frequent resynchronization;
 Such schedules are not easily adapted to different load situations; it is difficult
for a node to give up unused time slots to its neighbors;
 The schedule of a node may require a significant amount of memory;
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Link – layer protocols
 The DLL has the task of ensuring a reliable communication link

between neighboring nodes;

 The DLL sits on the top of the packet transmission and reception

service offered by the MAC layer and offers its services to the
network layer and other higher layers;
 Tasks:
 Error control: the effect of errors must be compensated; the efficiency
and energy consumption of the different error – control mechanisms
depends on the error patterns on the link;
 Framing: user data is formatted in packets or frames; the format and size
of packets can have significant impact on performance metrics like
throughput and energy consumption;
 Flow control: introduces signaling to let the transmitter slow down
transmission when the receiver is not able to accept packets; it is not an
issue in SNs;
 Link management: it involves discovery, setup, maintenance and
teardown of links of neighbors; link quality;

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 Error control:
 The data transport service provided by a link layer can be characterized
in terms of the following attributes: error – free, in – sequence, duplicate
– free and loss – free;
 The information that the receiver node’s link layer delivers to its users
should contain no errors, the transmitted bits should be reproduced
exactly;
 Errors are outlined by bit errors and packet losses; properties in WSNs:
 Both are bursty, that is they tend to occur in clusters with error – free periods
between the clusters; the empirical distribution of clusters and error – free
periods have a large coefficient of variation;
 The error behavior even for static transmitter and receiver is time varying, and
in the instantaneous bit – error rates can be sometimes quite high, 10 -4 – 10-2;
the same is true for packet – loss rates, which can reach values beyond 50 %;
 ARQ (Automated Repeat Request) techniques
 The transmitter node’s link layer accepts a data packet, creates a link – layer
packet by prepending a header and a checksum, and transmits this packet to
the receiver; the receiver checks the packet’s integrity with the help of the
checksum and provides feedback to the transmitter regarding the success of
packet transmission; on receiving negative feedback, the transmitter performs
a retransmission;

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 There are 3 standard ARQ protocols;
 Alternating bit (Send and Wait):
 The transmitter buffers one packet, sends it, and sets a timer;
 The receiver either receives the packet and sends a positive ack or nothing is
received and the receiver keeps quiet or transmits a negative ack;
 In case of a positive ack the transmitter’s buffer is freed and the next packet is
loaded
 Otherwise, the packet is retransmitted;
 The transmitter stamps each new packet with sequence numbers alternating
between 0 and 1; retransmitted packets are copies of the original packet and have
thus the same sequence number;
 The sequence numbers allow the receiver to detect duplicates, which result if the
positive ack, not the data packet, is lost;
 It can provide loss – free, duplicate – free and in – sequence delivery of data;
 Goback N:
 Alternating bit is inefficient in case when multiple packets are in transit on the same
link; Goback N allows the transmitter to have multiple unacknowledged frames;
 The transmitter keeps a buffer for up to N packets, called its window;
 Each packet in the window has its own timer, started upon the packet’s transmission;
 The receiver accepts frames only in sequence and drops frames that are correctly
received but do not have the expected sequence number, typically because some
previous frame had been lost;
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 Therefore, the receiver only needs buffer space for a single frame;
 One common strategy for acknowledgements is to let the receiver always
acknowledge the last packet arrived in sequence;
 If at the transmitter the timer for the oldest frame expires because the corresponding
acknowledgement has not been received, this frame and all other frames in the
window are retransmitted;
 Selective Repeat/ Selective Reject:
 Unlike to Goback N protocol, in Selective Repeat the receiver has also N buffers and
uses them to buffer frames arriving out of sequence;
 To achieve in – sequence delivery of data to the user, the receiver keeps out – of –
sequence packets in the data buffer until the missing packets have arrived;
 The receiver can use both positive and negative acknowledgments;
 The transmitter retransmits only those packets for which no acknowledgment has
been received within the timeout period;
 Send and Wait and Selective Repeat have the important property that only
erroneous packets are retransmitted while Goback N potentially retransmits
correctly received packets, which is a waste of energy;
 In practice, often, the number of retransmissions/ packet is bounded to avoid
spending too much energy in hopeless cases; in this case, a loss – free
service can not be guaranteed; such a protocol is also said to be semi
reliable;

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 FEC (Forward Error Correction) techniques:
 The transmitter accepts a stream or a block of user data bits or source bits,
adds suitable redundancy and transmits the result toward the receiver;

 Depending on the amount and structure of the redundancy, the receiver might
be able to correct some bit errors;
 FEC can be used as an open loop technique, meaning there is no feedback
from the receiver; accordingly, the transmitter uses the same coding method
all the time;
 The lack of feedback is energy saving, since feedback is usually provided
through acknowledgement packets; these would require the transmitting node
to switch its transceiver into receive mode and wait for the acknowledgement;
therefore both the reception costs (for the acknowledgement) and the costs
for the receiver turnaround are saved;
 Furthermore, since typically the data packets in WSNs tend to be small, the
acknowledgement packets make up a significant share of the total energy to
transmit a packet;
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 Power control:
 The reliability of packet transmission over a link can be increased by
increasing the radiated output power of the transmitter;
 Increasing this power increases the energy per bit, E b/N0 and the SNR, thus
decreasing the need for retransmissions;
 It was shown that for a single – hop ad hoc network there is an optimal
transmit power (equivalent to a BER target) balancing the radiated energy and
the need for retransmissions for a given packet length;
 In larger networks, with multihop communication, things are different; if one
node increases its transmit power, it also increases the interference seen by
other nodes and thus effectively the bit error rates;
 Error concealment:
 The idea is to not correct all transmission errors but to live with them to some
extent and to take other measures to let the influence of errors disappear for
the application;
 This relaxes the reliability requirements and energy consumption, but at the
price of higher computational efforts;
 Error concealment is not primarily a link layer technique but needs to
incorporate application information;

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Link management
 Link quality:

 It can be expressed in terms of packet loss rates; features:

 For a given transmit power, there is no deterministic relationship between
distance and link quality; nodes at the same distance from the transmitter can
experience widely varying packet loss rates;
 The region around a node having a certain packet loss rate does not have the
shape of a circle, but is irregular;
 There is a significant degree of asymmetric links; in such a link, packets sent
from node A to node B are received by B with few losses but conversely A
receives B’s packets with much higher loss probability; the fraction of
asymmetric links grows with the distance, taking values between 5 and 15%
of all links;
 The packet loss rate is time variable even when the neighbors in question are
stationary; although the mean loss rate for a given distance over time is more
or less fixed, there can be significant short – term variations;
 If a node wants to estimate the quality of a link toward a neighboring
node, it has to do so by receiving packets from the neighbor and
computing loss rates; because of the variability, it is not sufficient.

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