CUPID - Communication Pattern Informed Duty Cycling in Sensor Networks

Now that sensor networks are gradually deployed in commercial settings, they must live up to many expectations, particularly offering both years of unattended operation and low-delay event reporting. However, experiences from real-world trials have shown that decent trade-offs between these two conflicting goals are hard to find. In this paper, we show how staggered wake-ups achieve this. We call this low-delay and low-power duty cycle management scheme CUPID because its parameterization is based on the expected communication patterns in the network, duty-cycle and latency requirements. We show by simulations and real-world experiments with more than 150 nodes that our scheme significantly reduces the packet delay for low-duty cycle settings, especially in large networks.