A new battery and redundancy aware node scheduling protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks demand energy conserving protocols at all layers of protocol stack in order to achieve increased network lifetime. In this work, we propose a node scheduling protocol for sensor networks that exploits the battery charge recovery property and node level redundancy with respect to sensing, in order to maximize the network lifetime. The protocol forms a virtual grid and periodically elects the active node in a given grid. The primary battery sources of the remaining redundant nodes are completely switched off. The periodic election of active nodes ensures that every redundant node recovers its battery charges during their inactive period. We compare the performance of our protocol with baseline approaches like Strict Alternation, Periodic Alternation which are redundancy aware and also with the standard IEEE 802.11 and T-MAC protocols. The simulation results reveal that our protocol achieves network lifetime as high as 20% to 40% than the other schemes, with un-interrupted sensing and reporting of the events to sink.