Scheduling Activities in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

We investigate scheduling activities in sensor networks; the materials covered are far beyond medium access control (MAC) protocols and the purpose is not to review specific or general purpose MAC approaches. Our purpose is more generic and we investigate scheduling strategies and techniques that could be applied to avoid interference, to prolong the network lifetime by reducing en- ergy consumption, to optimize network performance by taking into account the underlying application communication patterns, to guarantee sensing coverage in monitoring tasks, and to achieve good levels of QoS. We examine scheduling under various interference models, including the traditional channel separation constraints model, the protocol model, and the physical Signal-to-Interference-plus- Noise-Ratio model. For each topic covered in this chapter, we survey the results and one or two representative works are examined in details as examples.