A Self-Adaptive Listen-Time Sleeping Algorithm Based on the Number of Neighbor Nodes for Wireless Mesh Sensor Networks

Abstract

Power saving is a very critical issue in wireless sensor network. Many schemes for power saving can be found in the literature, but these schemes barely consider different topology of nodes. In this paper, based on S-MAC algorithm, NALS-MAC algorithm is designed and combined with the characters of application background of wireless mesh sensor networks. According to the number of neighbor nodes, sensor nodes self-adaptively generate the listen-time during a period respectively. The node with more neighbors will have longer listen-time, because more neighbors means higher probability of heavy traffic. The nodes need longer time to deal with information than nodes with low traffic. The results show that the sensor nodes adjusting the listen-time self-adaptively in proper way achieves the reduction of end-to-end delay and enhance throughout.