Energy Saving in Intermittent Receiver-Driven Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks

A major challenge in wireless sensor networks is energy saving. In the intermittent receiver-driven data transmission (IRDT) protocol, which aims to save energy, communication between nodes commences when multiple receiver nodes transmit their own IDs intermittently and a sender node receives them. Our previous research focused on the performance characteristics of IRDT when this intermittent transmission interval changes. In this paper, we analyze the probability of control packet collisions as a function of the intermittent interval and introduce a procedure for determining the proper interval that minimizes this probability. We also present that data aggregation mechanism is very suitable for IRDT and can improve the performance of IRDT. Through simulations, we show that IRDT with a proper interval and data aggregation can attain a high packet collection ratio and a large reduction in energy consumption. Specifically, the proposed method achieves a more than 99% packet collection ratio and 90% lower power consumption than that of the original IRDT.