ELECTION: energy-efficient and low-latency scheduling technique for wireless sensor networks

We propose ELECTION, a new sleep scheduling scheme that adaptively schedules the sleep cycles of both communication radios and sensors in wireless active sensor networks. Taking advantage of spatial and temporal correlations in the underlying physical phenomenon, our scheme controls sleeping schedules of radios and sensors, and adaptively meets the energy efficiency, latency and responsiveness needs of applications. During the normal phase of operation, sensors take samples of the environment once at each wakeup time, and based on the perceived environment they adapt their sleep cycles. When an abnormality is perceived from the sampled data, sensors communicate with their neighbors to form a cluster and report to the base station. Analysis and simulation results show that ELECTION outperforms existing protocols significantly in terms of energy savings as well as delay and responsiveness.