Priority Polling Strategy for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a novel information acquiring and processing technology. To increase the life of WSN, each sensor node has to transmit the queuing data efficiently and conserve its energy, how to share the query of transmission for the collected information of sensor nodes becomes a new problem. Based on polling scheme with the unique characteristics of contention-free of access, this paper presents an efficient strategy of priority polling scheme which consists of a key node and N common nodes, provided with exhaustive service and limited-1 service in discrete time respectively. By the embedded Markov chain theory and the probability generation function method, we give closed form expressions for obtaining the mean queue length and the mean waiting time characteristics of the sensor nodes, and the analytical results are verified through extensive computer simulations. The performance results reveal that this new scheme can be enrolled in design of MAC protocols to improve the efficiency of data transmission and reduce unnecessary energy consumption for sensor nodes, and it can be used for differentiating priority service to guarantee better QoS in WSN.