Coarse-Grained Scheduling for Gateway Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks

A lot of realistic applications in sensor networks adopt hierarchical architecture in which sensor nodes are grouped into clusters, with each cluster relying on a gateway node for local data aggregation and long-distance radio transmission. Compared to normal sensor nodes, the gateway nodes, also called application nodes (ANs), are equipped with relatively powerful transceivers and have more energy. Nevertheless, since an AN is the main gateway for sensor nodes within its cluster, its energy may be depleted more quickly than normal sensor nodes. As such, it is important to find methods to save energy for ANs. This paper presents and evaluates an energy efficient coarse-grained scheduling scheme for ANs.