Feedback scheduling of sensor network activity using a Hybrid Dynamical Systems approach

Wireless sensor nodes are now cheap and reliable enough to be deployed in different environments. However, their limited energy capacity limits their lifespan. In this paper, a power management strategy at network-level for a set of nodes is proposed. The control strategy makes use of a Hybrid Dynamical System approach, where solutions may continuously flow according to some differential equations and may discontinuously jump according to some rules. The goal of the proposed control strategy is to improve the scalability issues while the network lifespan is not decreased when compared to a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach, leading to an improvement in the network power consumption. The strategy is evaluated in simulation on a realistic benchmark. Simulation results and their comparison to results obtained with an MPC strategy show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.