A Gossip-Based Energy Conservation Protocol forWireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

In this paper, we present an energy conservation scheme for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks using gossiping to place nodes in an energy saving sleep state. The technique is termed the Gossip-based Sleep Protocol (GSP).With GSP, each node randomly goes to sleep for some time with gossip sleep probability p. GSP is based on the observation that in a well connected network there are usually many paths between a source and destination, so a percentage of nodes can be in an energy conserving sleep mode without losing network connectivity. GSP needs few operations, scales to large networks and does not require a wireless node to maintain the states of other nodes. We propose two versions of GSP, one for synchronous networks and one for asynchronous networks, and afterward extend GSP to adapt to network traffic conditions. We show the advantages of the GSP approach through both simulations and analysis.