Adaptive Duty-Cycling to Enhance Topology Control Schemes in Wireless Sensor Networks

To prolong the network lifetime, various scheduling approaches that schedule wireless devices of nodes to switch between active and sleep states have been studied. Topology control schemes are one of the scheduling approaches that can extend the network lifetime and reduce the additional communication delays at the same time. However, they do not guarantee that all nodes have the same lifetime. They reduce the network coverage and prevent seamless communications. This paper proposes an adaptive duty-cycling (ADC) scheme to solve the unbalanced energy consumption generated from the conventional topology control schemes. Our scheme can be applied as a subprocess of them and enable well-balanced energy consumption among all nodes by applying a different duty-cycle to each group based on group size. Therefore, ADC scheme reduces the coverage reduction and maintains the communication delay as a constant throughout the network lifetime. Simulation results show that our scheme extends the network lifetime by at least 25%. This paper also proposes t -ADC scheme. It can be more effectively applied to various environments by adjusting the duty-cycle determined by the ADC scheme which is based on the network traffic amount. We show that t -ADC scheme prolongs the lifetime up to 17% compared to ADC scheme in a low traffic network.