A low-delay energy-efficient decision strategy in duty-cycled wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In many event–driven wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where sensor nodes are often put in a duty–cycled mode for energy saving, event delay and energy efficiency are always at odds. Detection of rare events in a fast and energy–efficient manner is an important and challenging issue in WSNs. In this paper, we aim at the moderate–scale networks and propose a fully distributed low–delay energy–efficient decision strategy (LEDS) to handle this problem. By adopting an online cooperative scheme between neighbouring sensing nodes, LEDS avoids the redundant transmissions and achieves a good network performance involving delay and energy efficiency. Moreover, we also extend our solution to the large–scale networks by combining LEDS with a sink augmentation scheme. Finally, our simulation results reveal that LEDS exhibits a quite good tradeoff between average event delay and network lifetime, and also outperforms the existing solution.