Distributed duty cycling optimization for asynchronous wireless sensor networks

One of the major sources of energy waste in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is idle listening, i.e., the cost of actively listening for potential packets. This paper focuses on reducing the idle-listening time via a dynamic duty cycling technique which aims at optimizing the sleep interval between consecutive wakeups. We considered receiver-initiated MAC method for WSNs, in which the sender waits for a beacon signal from the receiver before starting to transmit. In this context, we propose an optimization framework for minimizing the energy waste of the most power hungry node of the network. To this aims, we first derive an analytic model that predicts nodes' energy consumption. Then, we use the model to derive an heuristic distributed optimization technique. Simulation results via NS-2 simulator are included to illustrate the accuracy of the model, and to assess the validity of the proposed scheme.