Low complexity duty cycle control with joint delay and energy efficiency for beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks

IEEE 802.15.4 defines a duty cycle based medium access control (MAC) protocol to reduce the energy consumption for devices in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A low duty cycle significantly improves the energy efficiency but reduces the available transmission time, thereby increases end-to-end delay. In this paper, we solve an adaptive duty cycle control problem for beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4 networks, which aims at minimising a joint-cost of energy consumption and end-to-end delay. The problem is formulated as a classical inventory control problem and the optimal adaptive duty cycle of the device is derived by applying dynamic programming (DP). We further propose a low complexity suboptimal adaptive duty cycle control by taking into account the computational limitation of the sensor devices. Simulation results show that the proposed duty cycle control effectively reduces energy consumption, end-to-end delay, and packet drop ratio under various network traffic.