An Energy-Balanced Task Scheduling Heuristic for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a static scheduling algorithm for assigning tasks with precedence constraints onto a cluster of heterogeneous sensor nodes connected by a single-hop wireless network so as to maximize the lifetime of the sensor network. The processing element on each sensor node is equipped with dynamic voltage scaling capability. In our algorithm, we assign the tasks to the sensor nodes so as to minimize the energy consumption of the tasks on each sensor node while keeping the energy consumption as balanced as possible. We also propose an algorithm to generate a second schedule that can improve the lifetime of the network further when it is used together with the original schedule. We observe up to 311% lifetime improvement in our simulations when our algorithms are compared to the baseline case where dynamic voltage scaling is not used.