An energy-efficient distributed schedulebased communication protocol for periodic wireless sensor networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the energy of the sensor nodes is a very scarce resource and it is desired to decrease the energy consumption in sensor nodes. The sensor node consumes energy when it is in transmitting, receiving, or idle listening state. In this paper, we discuss the design of an Energy-Efficient Distributed Schedule-Based (EEDS) Communication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. We decrease the energy consumed by decreasing the amount of time a sensor node is in idle listening state. EEDS is intended for applications with periodic data traffic where event reporting is initiated every specific time interval from the sensing node. In EEDS, the time is divided into rounds. Each round is composed of three phases: building the tree, building the schedule, and data transmission. In building the tree phase, an energy-aware tree is built. A TDMA schedule is constructed in a distributed manner during the building the schedule phase. This schedule will be used for data transmission in the data transmission phase. To ensure a reliable communication tree for the whole sensor network, at the beginning of each round the tree is rebuilt, and a new TDMA schedule is reconstructed. We evaluate EEDS in the context of network lifetime, aggregate throughput, and energy consumption. The simulation results show how EEDS can provide signification improvements when compared with Energy Aware Data centric routing protocol (EAD) and the well-known LEACH protocol for different network configurations.