An Energy-Efficient One-Shot Scheduling Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In low-load wireless sensor networks, the power consumption of the node consists mainly of two parts: data transmission and node state switching. The lower node workload causes low energy consumption on data transmission, and the state switching energy of the node cannot be ignored. This paper proposes a one-shot time division multiple access (TMDA) scheduling with unlimited channels (SUC) on the assumption that the number of available channels is unlimited. SUC combines the receiver-based consecutive slot allocation with channel allocation, which minimises the number of node state switching and optimizes energy efficiency. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the number of channels required by SUC does not exceed log2N+1, where N indicates the number of nodes. Seeing that the number of available wireless channels is limited in practice, the paper proposes the scheduling with limited channels (SLC) and uses a Lookahead Search mechanism to solve slot conflict. For the scalability of the algorithm, a distributed implementation based on the token change is proposed. The algorithm uses the depth-first-search (DFS) to pass the token to all nodes and terminates slot and channel assignment. The simulation results show our algorithm can reduce the energy consumption by minimizing the number of state switching and shorten the data aggregation time by reusing slots among nodes.