Adaptive data collection with free addressing and dynamic duty-cycling for sensor networks

Abstract

To improve the lifetime of the battery-powered sensors for data collection, duty-cycling is commonly adopted. A fixed duty cycle may cause a long packet delivery latency, low network capacity, and poor energy efficiency, especially in a frequently-reporting application. Moreover, considering a heterogeneous network consisting of various sensor platforms from different manufacturers, not only is node addressing with regard to address definition, management, and allocation difficult and costly, but also different addressing schemes will obstruct cross-platform communications. Based on the above considerations, this paper proposes an Adaptive Data Collection (ADC) with two features naturally and seamlessly integrated, i.e., free addressing and dynamic duty-cycling, to improve network heterogeneity, load adaptivity, and energy efficiency. ADC has been implemented in the Contiki Operating System. The evaluations based on a heterogeneous testbed consisting of two hardware platforms have demonstrated its practicality and efficacy.