Distributed Scheduling Protocols for Energy Efficient Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

A major design challenge in wireless sensor network application development is to provide appropriate middleware service protocols to control the energy consumption according to specific application scenarios. In common application scenarios such as in monitoring or surveillance systems, it is usually necessary to extend the system monitoring area as large as possible to cover the maximal area. The two issues of power conservation and maximizing the coverage area have to be considered together with both the sensors’ communication connectivity and their power management strategy. In this chapter,the authors proposed novel enhanced sensor scheduling protocols to address the application scenario of typical surveillance systems. Their protocols take into consideration of both power conservation and coverage ratio to search for the balance between the different requirements. They proposed both centralized and de-centralized sensor scheduling versions, and compared the performance of different algorithms using several metrics. The results provide evidence of the advantages of our proposed protocols comparing with existing sensor scheduling protocols.