An Energy-Aware Scheduling Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are widely adopted in target tracking applications. Wireless sensor nodes are battery-powered devices. These low-cost communication devices have high failure rates and are vulnerable to attacks. To maintain network connectivity and to ensure large network coverage, excessive wireless sensor nodes are usually deployed to provide redundancy. However, these extra wireless sensor nodes would dissipate more power. This problem can be relieved by proper scheduling and putting unnecessary sensor nodes into sleep mode. In this paper, an energy-aware scheduling scheme for wireless sensor networks is proposed. The proposed scheme is a kind of an adaptive/periodic on-off scheduling scheme in which sensor nodes use only local information to make scheduling decisions. The scheme is evaluated in terms of target hit rate, detection delay, and energy consumption per successful target detection. Simulation results show that when comparing with other generic scheduling schemes, the proposed scheme can significantly reduce energy consumption.