Decentralized Multi-Level Duty Cycling in Sensor Networks

Prolonging network lifetime while efficiently detecting and reporting events are arguably the most important objectives of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Different WSN protocols aim to improve such measures, yet partially focus on certain aspects (eg. reliability and time latency) and sacrifice others (eg. power efficiency) in application specific approaches. We present DMULD (decentralized multi-level duty cycling), a cross-layer design paradigm aiming at raising performance measures of general WSNs. It integrates tailored multi-level sleep states having varying levels of performance (hence energy consumption) with novel sensing, medium access control (MAC) and routing protocols. Nodes carry on tasks in a decentralized manner with efficient load balancing. DMULD is a dynamic model which is adaptable to application specific requirements, through fine tuning its parameters. DMULD was thoroughly simulated, examining the effects of varying its parameters on network lifetime and efficiency. It achieved over double the lifetime of multi-hop CSMA/CA.