Energy-Efficient and Low-Delay Scheduling Strategy for Low Power Wireless Sensor Network

Energy consumption is a critical factor in wireless sensor network (WSN) and the radio is recognized as a major source of energy consumption in sensor nodes, therefore, many energy-efficient MAC protocols have been developed. The Scheduled Channel Polling-MAC (SCP) protocol minimizes the preamble by combining preamble sampling and scheduling techniques, it is very energy efficient, especially at very low duty cycles. However, due to its synchronization procedure, it results in increased contention and delay. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient and low-delay scheduling strategy for MAC layer, which inherits good features from SCP-MAC while considering reducing delay and contention in the context of remote monitoring and data gathering applications in IEEE 802.15.4 WSN. Therefore, our strategy allow for much longer network lifetime while satisfying the delay constraints. The simulations and experiments show the performance of the proposed strategy.