In the sensor networks for surveillance, the requirements of providing energy efficiency and service differentiation, which is to deliver high-priority packets preferentially, while maintaining high goodput, which is to deliver many packets within their deadline are increasing. However, previous works have difficulties in satisfying the requirements simultaneously. Thus, we propose GES-MAC, which satisfies the requirements simultaneously. GES-MAC reduces idle listening energy consumption by using a duty cycle, periodic listen (i.e., turn on radio module) and sleep (i.e. turn off radio module) of sensor nodes. Cluster-based multi-hop scheduling provides high goodput in a duty-cycled environment by scheduling clusters of nodes in the listen period and opportunistically forwarding data packets in the sleep period. Priority-aware schedule switching makes more high-priority packets reach the sink node by letting high-priority packets preempt the schedules of low-priority packets. In experiments with MICA2 based sensor nodes and in simulations, the energy consumption of the radio module is reduced by 70% compared to the approaches without a duty cycle, while providing 80% 100% goodput of the approaches that provide high goodput. Service differentiation is also supported with little overhead.

This letter discusses the prediction of the time-varying bit error rate (BER) for a transmitting channel using recent transmissions and retransmissions. Depending on the predicted BER, we propose a maximum frame size control to improve the goodput in wireless networks. It is shown, using simulation, that when the maximum frame size is controlled relative to the time-varying BER the goodput of the network is improved.

There has been a growing interest in multihop wireless ad hoc networks in recent years. Previous studies have shown that, in a wireless multihop network using the slotted ALOHA as the medium access control mechanism, the maximum throughput can be achieved if the number of neighbors is six to eight. We show that, when using the IEEE 802.11 DCF protocol in a wireless ad hoc network, the maximum end-to-end goodput is achieved when all nodes are within transmission range of each other. The main reason is that the channel spatial reuse factor gained from the multihop network does not match the increase in additional transmission hops that a packet needs to travel in a multihop network. For a multihop network, its MAC frame delivery capacity is approximately fixed at a value dependent on its spatial reuse factor. If the offered load increases, less capacity will be spent on delivering packets that eventually reach their destinations and hence resulting in lower end-to-end goodput.