Duty cycle adaptation with respect to traffic

Energy is a scarce resource in wireless sensor networks. Usually, during the deployment phase an appropriate duty cycle has to be found to adjust the trade-off between energy consumption and transmission delay. In this paper an adaptation algorithm for the duty cycle adjustment during runtime of the sensor network is proposed. Thereby, the traffic originating from sensor nodes is monitored in the relay node. Subsequently, the relay node evaluates the traffic whether the duty cycle has to be changed. The algorithm is evaluated in static and dynamic scenarios. It reveals that it can adapt to changing traffic, depending on the parameterization of the adaptation. The proposed adaptation algorithm saves energy in applications with strong requirements according to energy consumption