Energy and Delivery Capacity of Wireless Sensor Networks with Random Duty-Cycles

Since battery energy is often a premium resource in wireless sensor networks, many systems attempt to conserve battery energy by turning the transceivers off in a process referred to as duty-cycling. In [4-5], the authors proposed two different random duty-cycling protocols utilizing pseudo random number generators to efficiently exchange ON/OFF schedules among neighboring nodes for transmission coordination. We propose two simple transmission schemes that are superior to the performance of the schemes in [4-5] in terms of energy consumption and a macro network metric termed delivery capacity. The delivery capacity measures the maximum long term average unicast traffic delivery capability of a network. Through analyses and simulations, we present a detailed energy and delivery capacity tradeoff study of the transmission schemes in [4-5] and the schemes we propose. We show that one of our proposed schemes is near-optimal in energy consumption for low traffic loads. In addition, we provide insights on the appropriate ON/OFF duty-cycling parameters that can achieve the optimal energy and delivery capacity tradeoff curve.