Efficient Scheduling for Sensor Networks

Sensor networks opened new opportunities to monitor the environment. In order to retrieve the desired data, sensors are usually organized into a hierarchy and synchronize when transmitting the data towards the base station. Many scheduling schemes have been proposed with the goal of allowing sensors to sleep as much as possible and ultimately save energy. In this paper, we propose two new scheduling algorithms that assign predefined slots to each sensor. These algorithms are distributed, need very little global information and do not need knowledge about the location of sensors or the network topology. As others, we also assume that loose clock synchronization is available. The experimental results confirm our expectations. They show a significant reduction in the average time awake per node of at least three times compared to more traditional routing protocols like TAG