An adaptive reporting frequency control scheme for energy saving on Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) typically aggregate sensed events into a sink by Continuous Monitoring (CM) or Event-Detection (ED). Cluster heads receiving and sending aggregated data have a difficulty in maintaining traditional cluster-based WSNs due to the energy hole problem, which leads to faster energy depletion around the sink. This paper shows how reporting frequency to the sink can be controlled in a cluster-based WSN. To date, there has been a few studies on controlling the reporting frequency to minimize power consumption in WSNs while guaranteeing accuracy. Thus, we propose an adaptive reporting frequency control algorithm (ARFC) with an accuracy constraint. It is shown that the power consumption of a cluster head and cluster members is considerably reduced. ARFC can anticipate the optimal reporting frequency according to an accuracy factor defined by an administrator. We also present a weighted ARFC in proportional to the number of sensor nodes. Mathematical results show that ARFC reduces more power consumption than traditional schemes without reporting control.