A tier-based duty-cycling scheme for forest monitoring

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks for forest monitoring are typically deployed in fields in which manual intervention cannot be easily accessed. An interesting approach to extending the lifetime of sensor nodes is the use of energy harvested from the environment. Design constraints are application-dependent and based on the monitored environment in which the energy harvesting takes place. To reduce energy consumption, we designed a power management scheme that combines dynamic duty cycle scheduling at the network layer to plan node duty time. The dynamic duty cycle scheduling is realized based on a tier structure in which the network is concentrically organized around the sink node. In addition, the multi-paths preserved in the tier structure can be used to deliver residual packets when a path failure occurs. Experimental results show that the proposed method has a better performance.