Sleep in the Dins: Insomnia therapy for duty-cycled sensor networks

Duty cycling mode is widely adopted in wireless sensor networks to save energy. Existing duty-cycling protocols cannot well adapt to different data rates and dynamics, resulting in a high energy consumption in real networks. Improving those protocols may require global information or heavy computation and thus may not be practical, leading to empirical parameters in real protocols. To fill the gap between the application requirement and protocol performance, we design a light-weight adaptive duty-cycling protocol (LAD), which reduces the energy consumption under different data rates and protocol dynamics. We theoretically validate the performance improvement of the protocol. We implement the protocol in TinyOS and extensively evaluate it on 40 TelosB nodes. The evaluation results show the energy consumption can be reduced by 28.2%~40.1% compared with state-of-the-art protocols. Results based on data from a 1200-node operational network further show the effectiveness and scalability of the design.