Battery-Aware TDMA Scheduling Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the critical problems for the wireless sensor networks is how to prolong the battery lifespan of the wireless sensor nodes. We proposed the cross-layer based battery-aware time division multiple access (TDMA) scheduling schemes for wireless sensor networks, which aim at maximizing the battery capacity utilization of wireless sensor nodes while satisfying the delay quality of service (QoS) requirements. Our proposed schemes take into account the joint effect of electrochemical properties of the battery, time-varying wireless fading channels, and packet queuing management. We develop a Markov chain model to analyze the performance of our proposed schemes. Based on the analytical model, we identify the tradeoff between the battery lifespan and the packet transmission delay. The analytical and simulation results show that our proposed schemes can significantly increase the battery lifespan of sensor nodes at the expense of acceptable increase of packet transmission delay.