Energy-efficient local wake-up scheduling in wireless sensor networks

Scheduling sensor activities is an effective way to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we explore the problem of wake-up scheduling in WSNs where sensors have different lifetime. A novel local wake-up scheduling (LWS) strategy is proposed to prolong the network lifetime with full coverage constraint. In the LWS strategy, sensors are divided into a first layer set and a successor set. The first layer set which satisfies the coverage constraint is activated at the beginning. Once an active sensor runs out of energy, some sensors in the successor set will be activated to satisfy the coverage constraint. Based on the LWS strategy, this paper presents an ant colony optimization based method, namely mc-ACO, to maximize the network lifetime. The mc-ACO is validated by performing simulations on WSNs with different characteristics. A recently published genetic algorithm based wake-up scheduling method and a greedy based method are used for comparison. Simulation results reveal that mc-ACO yields better performance than the two algorithms.