Arab J Sci Eng (2013) 38:21152123

DOI 10.1007/s13369-013-0571-8

RESEARCH ARTICLE - ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

A PON-Based Large Sensor Network and Its Performance

Analysis with Sync-LS MAC Protocol
Monir Hossen Ki-Doo Kim Youngil Park

Received: 23 May 2011 / Accepted: 6 October 2011 / Published online: 15 February 2013
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals 2013

Abstract Properties of a large sensor network in a ubiq-

uitous-City should include increased energy efficiency and
reduced latency. These two properties are mainly dependent
on the network size and the number of hops. Both of them can
be improved by using an efficient clustering algorithm. In this
paper, we introduce a clustering algorithm based on a passive
optical network (PON) system, where optical line terminal is
analogous to personal area network coordinator and optical
network unit performs as cluster head. Application of a PON
system to a sensor network can lead to an efficient converged
network, because a PON system can integrate a large sensor
network where a lot number of nodes are distributed over
wide area. If the large network is converged on a single PON
system, then the management of the system becomes very
efficient and cost effective. We also present a new medium
access control protocol to improve the performance of the
sensor network. Proposed schemes are analyzed with a test
network, and the results show that they are very efficient in
delay-sensitive large sensor network.
1 Introduction
Keywords PON MAC
Latency-secured MAC (LS-MAC) Extension of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has been
Latency Clustering investigated to service a large ubiquitous-City (u-City) with
its significant applications in scientific, medical, meteorolog-
ical, and military operations. That is why WSNs are becom-
ing the next step in information revolution of the twenty-first
century [1]. Sensor nodes are expected to be deployed ran-
domly in a large area and form a network in an ad hoc manner.
M. Hossen K.-D. Kim Y. Park
Department of Electronics Engineering,
As the size and complexity of individual WSN are increas-
Kookmin University, Seoul 136-702, Korea ing exponentially, it is challenging to ensure the coverage of
wide area and maintain the network traffic uniformly. Usu-
M. Hossen (B) ally, many sensor nodes in a network share the same wireless
Dr. Hanawas Laboratory, Interdisciplinary Graduate School
channel and medium access control (MAC) protocol speci-
of Medicine and Engineering, University of Yamanashi,
4-3-11 Takeda, Kofu, Yamanashi 400-8511, Japan fies how the sensor nodes will share the same channel in an
e-mail: mnrhossen@yahoo.com efficient way [2].

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The main problems of large WSN are latency, energy
consumption, hidden node problem, network coverage, and
contention. Usually, latency and energy consumption issues
are the two most important factors for the implementation
of large WSN. Existing schemes have problems in these
respects. For many applications such as medical service and
fire alarm, latency efficiency is the prime requirement. The
periodic sleep mode of sensor nodes for energy saving is
one of the factors that increases the latency. Latency also
increases due to increase of the number of hops and network
size. It has been understood that reduction of network size
is obligatory to overcome the above problems. An efficient
clustering of large WSN can be a solution to reduce the indi-
vidual network diameter as well as hop numbers when the
whole network size is enlarged. Since sensor nodes in clus-
tered networks transmit data over shorter distance, the energy
spent in the network will be much lower than the case when
each node directly communicates with the personal area net-
work coordinator (PANC) [3]. Thus, clustered sensor nodes
life span will be extended due to less energy consumption.
In [4,5] a cluster-based WSN is proposed where all sensor
nodes of a cluster is connected with the coordinator through a
small number of hops and all the coordinators are connected
to the PANC by radio-over-fiber (RoF) link. Application of
optical network in clustering the large size WSN is very use-
ful in that the optical attenuation is very small while wide
bandwidth can be utilized.
Passive optical network (PON) is an optical network that
does not contain active elements from source to destination.
It only contains passive optical devices such as optical fibers,
couplers, splices and splitters. PON can be deployed in sev-
eral topologies, e.g., tree, ring, or bus [6]. Tree topology is
the most suitable one for the proposed structure where optical
fiber is used to connect the PANC with cluster heads (CHs)
to minimize the RF transmission path and data collision.
This paper presents a new MAC protocol for PON-based
large WSN called Synchronized Latency Secured (Sync-LS)
algorithm with an appropriate super-frame format. The main
goal of this protocol is to reduce the requirement of the num-
ber of time frame regardless of the number of hops in the
cluster. An efficient clustering algorithm called cooperative
clustering for PON is also proposed to split the network,
which is very effective to limit the cluster size and balance the
network traffic among clusters. The expected performance of
the new Sync-LS MAC protocol and the cooperative cluster-
ing algorithm is evaluated by simulation and compared with
existing schemes.
2 Principles of the PON-Based Sensor Networks
As the size of sensor network becomes larger, the number of
hops in the network is increased and the packet delay grows
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Arab J Sci Eng (2013) 38:21152123
exponentially. Therefore, clustering of the network is needed
to meet the performance requirement of the sensor network.
Each cluster head can be connected to the PANC using wire-
less or wired transmission. A PON system is proposed for this
purpose since its tree topology can be integrated into a large
sensor network in appropriate way and it can provide larger
bandwidth compared to other types of access network. The
need for clustering and the basic architecture of the PON-
based sensor network are described in this section.
2.1 Architecture of PON-Based Wireless Sensor Networks
The forward and reverse data transmissions in the hybrid
PON-based WSN are shown in Fig. 1, which consists of sta-
tic cluster heads (CHs) at optical network unit (ONU) sites
of PON, distributed sensor nodes, and PANC integrated with
optical line terminal (OLT). ONUs/CHs are connected with
PANC/OLT through optical fiber. A beacon from OLT/PANC
is considered as an initiator of a forward time frame, which
is followed by a data packet. The reverse data transmis-
sion procedure follows the Sync-LS MAC protocol which
is explained in Sect. 3. Since the protocol of time division
multiplexing PON (TDM-PON) such as multi-point control
protocol (MPCP) manages the upstream data, the utilization
of upstream bandwidth is maximized and the normal latency
within a PON system is less than a few ms. Therefore, the
latency in the PON system is negligible compared to that in
the WSN.
2.2 Clustering of the Large Sensor Networks
When a PON system is introduced as a part of a WSN, sensor
nodes should first be clustered in an appropriate way so that
ONUs can find their positions. The goal of the clustering is to
connect all constituent sensor nodes with optimized number
of cluster heads and hops. The relation between these two
parameters is investigated for 500 sensor nodes which are
randomly distributed in 500 m 500 m area. It is assumed
that cluster heads are positioned so that each of them can
serve nearly the same number of sensor nodes. By increasing
the number of CHs, the maximum number of hop in a cluster
can be reduced while the network coverage can be increased.
Figure 2 shows the numerical results of maximum number
of hops versus coverage ratio. From Fig. 2 we can find that
if the number of cluster heads is set to 2, then the coverage
ratio (y-axis) reaches almost 1.0 when maximum number of
hops in a cluster (x-axis) becomes 7. However, if the number
of cluster heads is set to 8, then four hops in each cluster are
enough to satisfy the 100 % coverage ratio. It is clear from
this figure that more cluster heads are needed to decrease the
required hop counts. Since there is a trade-off between these
two parameters, they should be planned in optimal way. The
required hops in Fig. 2 are minimized values since nodes are
Arab J Sci Eng (2013) 38:21152123 2117

Fig. 1 Forward and reverse

data transmission in PON-based
WSN Sensor node

Beacon
ONU 1

Forward
Splitter/
data
Combiner n

1 2

OLT/ ONU ONU ONU

PANC 1 2 N 1 2 n
ONU 2

1
Beacon 2
Optical fiber n
ONU N
Reverse
data

1.0 3.1 Existing MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

CH=2
0.8 CH=4 In the basic sensor MAC (S-MAC) [7] periodic listen and
CH=6
CH=8 sleep in each time frame is maintained to reduce idle listen-
Coverage ratio

0.6 ing period, avoid data overhearing, and shrink the control
packet overhearing which reduces the overall energy con-
sumption of WSN. No doubt S-MAC tries to reduce the waste
0.4
of energy from all the above sources, but at the cost of high
latency which is undesirable in delay-sensitive networks. The
0.2 main reason of high latency is the requirement of the number
of time frames which is directly proportional to the number
0.0 of hops in the network. It also needs SYNC (synchroniza-
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 tion) packet transmission from the coordinator to multiple
Maximum number of hops in a cluster hops, requiring much energy to cover large sensor networks.
Fig. 2 Network coverage as a function of hops and cluster heads In order to reduce this delay-adaptive S-MAC [8] is proposed.
It allows two-hop transmission consecutively in a time frame.
This protocol reduces the requirement of the number of time
evenly assigned among clusters. Therefore, clusters should frames as well as overall latency of the networks by half
be designed as symmetric as possible from its deployment compared to basic S-MAC.
stage. Suh et al. [9] proposed latency and energy-efficient MAC
(LE-MAC) which is a useful approach for reducing sleep
delay in multiple hops. Its performance depends on the ability
of CS range, which is normally not more than twice of actual
3 Principles of the Sync-LS MAC in Delay-Sensitive transmitting or receiving range. In this respect, LE-MAC pro-
Large Sensor Networks posed up to 4-hops transmission in a single time frame. If
the total number of hops in a network is more than 4, then it
Various issues should be considered in the design of a sen- requires another time frame. The performance of this scheme
sor network including latency, energy consumption, cover- is restricted by carrier sensing (CS) range and SYNC signal
age, and clustering. In recent years, extensive studies have transmission distance.
been performed to increase the efficiency of the sensor net- Zigbee [10] is an acceptable protocol that provides an effi-
work. In this section, a short review of related protocols is cient algorithm to avoid data collision and excessive energy
presented and compared with the proposed scheme in large consumption in large sensor network. This protocol intro-
sensor networks. duced beacon rather than SYNC signal which is transmitted

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Fig. 3 Operation of Sync-LS Beacon +
MAC F. Data
t margin
N4
N3
N2
N1
Sleep Time
CH
Forward frame
from coordinator to children nodes in hop-by-hop fashion.
Zigbee also uses periodic listen and sleep cycle to avoid idle
listening as well as to increase the battery life, but the latency
is still undesirable for the delay-sensitive large networks. As
in the basic S-MAC protocol, the number of time frames
required in data transmission is directly proportional to the
number of hops in the networks.
3.2 Synchronized Latency-Secured MAC
According to the review described in the previous section, all
existing sensor protocols are not adequate in delay-sensitive
large sensor networks due to latency problem. Since it
requires multiple time frames for the reverse transmission,
the latency for the reverse data is more critical. A new type
of algorithm, a Sync-LS MAC protocol, is proposed to alle-
viate this problem. When this protocol is combined with the
clustering scheme, it will further reduce the reverse delay to
a negligible amount.
Figure 3 shows the basic scheme of the Sync-LS MAC
protocol for a sensor network with four hops. The time frame
is divided into forward and reverse time frames. In the for-
ward frame every node periodically wakes up to broadcast
the beacon and forward data to its neighbors, and then goes
to sleep mode until it enters the reverse frame. The bea-
con carries information like frame structure, total hop num-
ber, wake-up time, network topology, node identification,
etc.
In the reverse frame the data packet from a source node,
i.e., node N4, is sent to a destination node CH, through
intermediate nodes N3, N2 and N1. Initially, the parent
node N3 transmits a beacon to node N4 and accordingly,
N4 transmits data to N3. After transmitting data node N4
switches to sleep mode to save energy. Similarly, the par-
ent node N2 transmits a beacon to its child node N3 and
receives the reverse data from it. This process is repeated
up to the CH within a single time frame. Every node
wakes up to communicate with its neighbors, and remains
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Arab J Sci Eng (2013) 38:21152123
Data
Beacon
Sleep Time
Reverse frame
Time frame of Sync-LS
in active state with 10 % duty cycle, and then goes again
into the sleep state until the next time frame starts. Duty
cycle is the ratio of active period over the time frame. The
active state in the reverse frame is initiated by a wake-up
timer that can be synchronized according to the following
equation.
tbr (H k) = tbf (H k)+k tf +tmargin +(k 1)tr ,
(1)
where tbr is the reverse beacon generation time, H the max-
imum hop number, k the hop distance from the edge node,
tbf the forward beacon time, tf the time interval between
forward beacons, tmargin the additional sleep time before the
reverse frame, tr the time interval between two consecutive
reverse beacons.
The required number of time frames for N-hop sensor net-
work in Zigbee, Adaptive S-MAC, and LE-MAC are N, N/2,
and N/4, respectively, which is reduced to only one in the pro-
posed Sync-LS MAC. Collision is another substantial factor
to increase the latency and energy consumption. To avoid the
collision a suitable super-frame structure and a cooperative
clustering algorithm is proposed.
4 A PON-Based Clustering Algorithm
and Its Performance Analysis
Clustering is a way that the sensor nodes are grouped in order
to achieve the network scalability [11]. An appropriate clus-
tering can solve the network coverage and traffic unbalance
problems among clusters. It can help the proper management
of time frame, even distribution of nodes among clusters, pro-
vision of minimized hop numbers. As a result, the number
of cluster heads and hop distance in each cluster can be opti-
mized. Moreover, a good clustering can limit the network
size within each cluster and save the energy consumption by
reducing the total traffic in the network.
Arab J Sci Eng (2013) 38:21152123 2119

4.1 Independent Clustering by Each Cluster Head
In this clustering algorithm, the PANC has no cooperation
with cluster heads in the registration process of each sen-
sor node. Instead, each cluster head is responsible for its
own clustering. Therefore, it should decide the maximum
hop number and ensure the coverage of the network. Since
there is no control traffic between the PANC and cluster
heads, the registration process is completed within wireless
network in this algorithm. Therefore, it is difficult to esti-
mate the appropriate hop number. To ensure the network
coverage each cluster head should allow enough hops than
optimized one, leading to non-symmetrical node distribution
among clusters. Figure 4 illustrates the result of this cluster-
ing algorithm applied for 500 sensor nodes randomly scat-
500
450
400
350
Distance [meter]
tered in 500 m 500 m area where maximum hop number 7
is allowed for each cluster to guarantee 100 % coverage. As
shown in this figure, the size of each cluster is quite different
depending on the clustering sequence, and it causes several
problems such as increased latency and inefficient energy
consumption.
4.2 Cooperative Clustering Based on PON Algorithm
Even distribution of sensor nodes among clusters is usually
an important factor in good performance and efficient data
management. It is also essential for efficient bandwidth man-
agement of PON system. Traffic load of each cluster is aggre-
gated by each cluster head, and balancing of this load among
clusters is another hot issue in WSNs. In such a case, main-
taining equal size of clusters is crucial. The proposed coop-
erative clustering algorithm is very effective scheme in that
the PANC handles the situation to fulfill the required goals.
Figure 5a represents the order of node registration during the
network deployment. At first, OLT/PANC assigns the hop

300
number 1 to each cluster head and allows the nodes regis-
tration only for the nodes with this hop number. If there are
250
additional registration requests from two-hop nodes, then the
200
PANC grants each cluster head to increase the allowable hop
150
number to 2. This process is continued until all registration
100 requests are responded. This sequential registration makes
50 each cluster head expand their service region step by step,
0 leading to even size of clusters. Figure 5b shows the sequence
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
of new node registration. In this algorithm, a newly added
Distance [meter]
sensor node transmits the registration request to its neigh-
Fig. 4 Simulation result of independent clustering for 500 sensor boring cluster head, which then checks the hop number. If
nodes it is less than the limit Hlim , then the registration is granted.

Fig. 5 Flowchart of
Start of node
cooperative clustering deployment
algorithm. a Registration of
nodes during network Receive registration
deployment. b Registration of PNC assigns the hop
request from new node
newly added nodes number 1 to each CH

Grant nodes registration

to corresponding CHs

PNC increases No
Report to
Hlim at each Hop distance
CH OLT/PANC
Hlim
Coverage of
the network Yes
< 100%
?

No
OLT/PANC Yes
selects ONU/CH
End of node
to register
registration Grant registration

(a) (b)

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500
450
400
350
Distance [meter]
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350
Distance [meter]
Fig. 6 Results of cooperative clustering for 500 sensor nodes
This Hlim is the final hop number assigned by the PANC dur-
ing network deployment. If the hop number exceeds Hlim ,
then the PANC handles the situationincreases Hlim and
grants registration, or finds out the cluster head that can be
reached in fewer hops. Figure 6 represents the simulation
result for 500 sensor nodes randomly deployed in 500 m
500 m area according to this algorithm. It is shown that nodes
are evenly distributed among four clusters.
The uneven registration of sensor nodes and non-
symmetric hop numbers among clusters cause huge data traf-
fic generation in the network. According to Tang et al. [4],
data repetition is proportional to the hop distances from the
source nodes to the cluster head. Total accumulated data bytes
P(t) in a data collection cycle are described in Eq. (2).

N The total latency is calculated according to the following
P(t) = h(i) p(i) + (n c n s ) (df + db ),
i=1
where h(i) means the number of hops to communicate with
the cluster head, p(i) the data bytes collected at sensor node
i, n c the total number of nodes in the cluster, n s the num-
ber of edge nodes in the cluster, df the forward data bytes,
and db the number of bytes in beacon. Figure 7 shows the
comparison of accumulated traffic generated in the network
for both algorithms. The total traffic load in the network for
independent clustering algorithm is far larger, mainly from
repetition over more hops. More data transmission in the net-
works also increases the collision probability which results
in more energy consumption and latency.
5 A Sync-LS MAC for Cooperative Clustering
and Its Performance Analysis
In this section, we analyze the latency and energy con-
sumption for the proposed Sync-LS MAC protocol and the
cooperative clustering algorithm of large WSN. Since a PON
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Arab J Sci Eng (2013) 38:21152123
90
Cooperative clustering
80 Independent clustering
Traffic in the network [Kbyte]
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
400 450 500
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Ratio of data generating nodes in each frame (%)
Fig. 7 Total accumulated traffic generated in the network
system is used as the infrastructure of large sensor networks,
dividing the large network into multiple small clusters, the
performance of the network is now dependent on the effi-
ciency of each cluster network. The protocol of TDM-PON
system makes packets from many cluster heads free from
collision and the delay of a PON is far less than that of WSN.
Therefore, the latency problem of the TDM-PON is negligi-
ble in calculating the total latency. The performance of the
Sync-LS MAC protocol is analyzed in two phases. In the first
phase, the performance of it is compared with those of other
existing MAC protocols. In the second phase, the effect of
frame size on the performance of Sync-LS MAC is analyzed.
In the proposed Sync-LS MAC protocol, packets can
transmit up to N-hops continuously in a single time frame.
(2) equation:
D(N ) = tq + N (tfw + trev ) + tmargin , (3)
where tq is the data queuing time, tfw the forward beacon and
data transmission time, and trev the reverse beacon and data
transmission time, and tmargin the sleep time between forward
and reverse frame.
Latency calculation is performed for the seven-hop sensor
network as shown in Fig. 8 and the results are compared with
those of Zigbee [10], Adaptive S-MAC [8], and LE-MAC [9].
The simulation network model was generated by randomly
scattering 40 sensor nodes in 200 m 75 m area. The con-
nection of the network is made by the cooperative clustering
algorithm. For the comparison among various protocols, it is
assumed that all sensor nodes generate 50-byte reverse data
packets in each time frame while PANC broadcasts 50-byte
forward data packets. Beacon sizes are 20-bytes in both direc-
tions. The time frame is set to 1 s and duty cycle, the ratio of
active period over the time frame, is assumed to be 10 % for
each node. The distance between two adjacent nodes is not
more than 40 m as in [8,9], and data rate is considered to be
Arab J Sci Eng (2013) 38:21152123 2121

70
50 Sync-LS
Zigbee
60
LE-MAC

Energy consumption [mj]

40
Distance [meter]

50 BR

40
30

30
20
20

10
10

0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 0
Distance [meter] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Hop distance
Fig. 8 Network model for simulating the performance of Sync-LS
MAC Fig. 10 Energy consumption for 1 s time frame and 10 % duty cycle

7
Sync-LS
mode is neglected. Hence, the total energy consumption for
6 LE-MAC
Adaptive S-MAC N-hop Sync-LS MAC is expressed as:
5 Zigbee

E T = n{Pt Tt + Pr (Ta Tt )},

Latency [Sec]

(4)
4

3 where n is the number of nodes in the network, Pt the power

2
1 tion or idle time, and Ta the active time dependent on the
0
1 2 3 4
Hop distance
Fig. 9 Average latency for 1 s time frame and 10 % duty cycle
1 Mbps. Same parameters are assumed for all the protocols.
Collision is not considered in this comparison among differ-
ent MAC protocols since the generated packet size is very
small compared to each time frame. The goal of this analysis
is to compare the increment of latency as the hop numbers
of each algorithm are increased.
Figure 9 shows that the latency of the Sync-LS MAC pro-
tocol is much smaller than those of the other protocols. It is
increasing as in Eq. (3), but, the amount is too small com-
pared to other schemes. The main reason is that the proposed
scheme requires only one time frame while LE-MAC, Adap-
tive S-MAC, and Zigbee need two frames, four frames and
seven frames, respectively.
Energy consumption is also calculated for the above
configuration and compared with those of other protocols.
Mostly, the energy consumption in WSNs is dependent on
the modes of sensor nodes. In active mode nodes are able
to transmit and receive data while in sleep mode all trans-
missions are halted. Therefore, energy consumption in sleep
consumption per second in transmission time, Tt the trans-
mission time, Pr the power consumption per second in recep-
duty cycle and time frame. It is assumed that data trans-
5 6 7
mission requires 24.75 mW while reception or idle mode
requires 13 mW, in balanced routing (BR) by Bouabdallah
et al. [12]. Figure 10 compares the energy consumption
among the proposed Sync-LS MAC, Zigbee [10], LE-MAC
[9], and BR [12] for the example network shown in Fig. 8.
Here, all nodes are assumed to generate data once in a time
frame. The energy consumption at each hop distance means
the cumulative energy required up to that hop numbers. From
the analysis, it is found that energy consumption of the pro-
posed Sync-LS MAC protocol is very close to those of other
protocols. Only a slight more energy is consumed, which
is attributed to beacon signals used in both directions. It
should be noted that the energy increase is negligible while
the latency reduction is quite a lot.
In the second phase, the performance of Sync-LS MAC
protocol is analyzed under different environments. Delay due
to data collision is considered in this case unlike the analy-
sis in the first phase. Figure 11 is the proposed super-frame
structure which is used for carrying both beacon and data.
Since the size of each slot has significant effect on data
collision, simulations are performed using different sizes of
super-frame.
The network model in Fig. 8 is also used for the analysis
in the second phase. Table 1 describes parameters used in the
analysis.

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Fig. 11 Super-frame structure Forward Reverse

of Sync-LS beacon beacon
Active
time
Sleep
Active time
time Sleep time

1 2 3 n-1 n Reverse frame

Forward
n= number of slots in reverse frame
frame
Sync-LS superframe

Table 1 Parameters used in the

analysis Symbol Parameter description Symbol Parameter description

tfa Active time for forward frame Pt Data transmission power per second
tfs Sleep time for forward frame Pr/i Data reception or idle state power per
second
tf Total length of forward frame Ci, j Number of collision before transmission
for jth node of ith hop
tra Active time for reverse frame
trs Sleep time for reverse frame Nh,i Number of nodes for ith hop
n Number of slots in reverse frame Pi, j Data generation ON/OFF of node (i, j)
tr Total length of reverse frame Tt Total transmission time in a cluster
TSF Total length of Sync-LS super-frame Tr/i Total reception and idle time in a cluster
tt Data transmission time in a hop ET Total energy consumption in the cluster
tc Data retransmission time after collision Hlim Optimized number of hops in a cluster
Dh Latency for single hop transmission nc Total number of nodes in the cluster
DT Total latency in Sync-LS MAC n SF Number of required super-frames

For the forward frame, it is assumed that tf = tfa + tfs
where tfa = (20-byte beacon + 50-byte forward data), tfs =
9 tfa and the duty cycle is 10 %. For the reverse frame,
tr = tra +trs where tra = (20-byte beacon + n50-byte reverse
data), trs = 9 tra and the duty cycle is 10 %. The total
length of a super-frame in Sync-LS MAC protocol can be
represented by TSF = tf + tr .
Data collision occurs when two or more children nodes try
to transmit data at the same time. If a collision happens, then
the colliding nodes should retransmit after a random time. If
the random time is larger than the remained active time of the
super-frame, then the transmission will be halted until next
super-frame and packets suffer from more delay. Following
equations are used to calculate the total latency considering
collision:
 sumption, total active time is divided into transmission and
t + tt + tc , if tc tra
Dh = f (5)
tf + tt + n SF TSF , if tc > tra
The total latency is accumulated by successive addition of
latency in all the hops as in Eq. (6).
lim 1
H
D T = tf + (Dhi tf )
i=0
Total latency is calculated for different number of slots in
the reverse frame and the results are shown in Fig. 12. The
ratio of data-generating nodes in the x-axis is proportional
to the newly generated sensor data in whole the network.
As the data-generating node is increased, latency increases
exponentially since the total traffic in the network increases
much faster than the generated data according to Eq. (2).
However, it is clear that latency is reduced with more active
slots since the collision is reduced also. For example, the
maximum latency is kept less than 0.05 s until the ratio of
generating node reaches 15 % when the reverse frame has 40
slots.
Since the frame size has close relation with energy
consumption, the number of slots should be decided by con-
sidering both latency and energy. To calculate the energy con-
reception/idle periods. The same power consumption values
in Eq. (4) are used here. The total transmission time in Sync-
LS MAC considering collision is
Nh,i

Hlim 
(6) Tt = n c tfa n SF + Pi, j [(1 + Ci, j ) tt ] (7)
i=0 j=0

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0.8 6 Conclusions
Average latency for 10 slot frame
Maximum latency for 10 slot frame
0.7
Average latency for 20 slot frame
Maximum latency for 20 slot frame A PON-based WSN can extend the area of future u-City with-
0.6
Average latency for 40 slot frame out increasing each clusters diameter because the PON sys-
Maximum latency for 40 slot frame
Latency [sec]

0.5 tem helps dividing the whole network into several clusters.
0.4
The proposed cooperative clustering algorithm will effec-
tively solve the non-symmetric clustering, unbalanced hop
0.3
numbers and data congestion problems. The new super-frame
0.2 structure of Sync-LS MAC can reduce the latency problem
of existing protocols of sensor networks. The analysis per-
0.1
formed in this study proves the validity of the proposed coop-
0.0 erative clustering algorithm and the Sync-LS MAC in its
4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
super-frame structure. Furthermore, it is found that the con-
Ratio of data generating nodes (%)
vergence of PON system with WSNs is an efficient approach
Fig. 12 Dependence of latency on frame size in that it provides scalability and sufficient bandwidth.

Acknowledgments This work was supported by the NRF Grant

(MEST No. 20110001371), ITRC support program (NIPA2011
140 10 slot frame C109011210005) and global scholarship program at Kookmin Uni-
20 slot frame
120 versity in Korea.
Energy consumption [mj]

40 slot frame

100

80
References
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