A routing layer sleep scheme for data gathering in wireless sensor networks

Data gathering is a typical operation in wireless sensor networks where data flow through a data gathering tree towards a sink node. Plenty of work had been done on constructing energy-efficient data gathering trees at the routing layer. However, data generation in wireless sensor networks could be bursty as it is driven by the events of interest. Without any sleep scheme, the sensor nodes will stay idle for most of the time. Therefore energy-efficient data gathering trees alone are not enough for energy saving. We propose a routing layer data gathering sleep scheme (DGSS) which could be incorporated into existing data gathering tree formation algorithms to save unnecessary energy consumption due to idle listening and meanwhile adapts to bursty traffic condition. We compare DGSS with DMAC, a popular energy efficient MAC protocol for data gathering, through simulations and show that DGSS can perform better than DMAC for bursty traffic at relatively high data rates.