Energy-Efficient Scheduling in WMSNs

. Recent technological breakthroughs in ultra-high integration and low-power electronics haveenabled the development of tiny battery-operated sensors. The signal processing and communicationactivities are the main consumers of sensor’s energy. Since sensors are battery-operated, keeping thesensor active all the time will limit the battery’s lifetime. Therefore, optimal organization and managementof the sensor network is crucial in order to perform the desired function with an acceptablelevel of quality and to maintain sufficient sensor energy for the required mission. Wireless multimediasensor networks (WMSN) are a new and emerging type of sensor networks producing multimedia content. These networks have the potential to enable a large class of applications. Many such applicationsrequire mechanisms to efficiently deliver application level quality of service (QoS) and to map these requirementsinto network layer metrics such as latency and jitter. Thus an efficient scheduling algorithmthat differentiates between levels of services by providing QoS guarantees is needed. Since WMSNsare battery-constrained, the algorithm should take into consideration energy-efficiency as well. In thispaper, we present a scheduling algorithm that takes into account the promptness of real-time multimediastreaming. The algorithm divides the frame into slots and assigns the slots to different nodes. We alsopresent an algorithm to interleave the slots in a way to minimize jitter. We have evaluated the interleavingalgorithm using Matlab and found that it minimizes the jitter for all nodes in a consistent way whilekeeping the overhead generated to a certain limit