A Group-Based Energy-Saving Algorithm for Sleep/Wake Scheduling and Topology Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, one of the main design challenges is to save energy of sensors and obtain long system lifetime without sacrificing the quality of network coverage and connectivity. Topology control is the primary technique of energy saving which consists to keep a minimum number of sensor nodes to operate in active mode with the purpose of conserving energy as well as ensuring network connectivity and/or coverage. In this paper, we propose a Group-based Energy-Conserving Protocol (GECP) for wireless sensor networks that extends the network lifetime by sleep scheduling among sensor nodes with the purpose to ensure the network connectivity. It exploits the sensor redundancy in the same region by dividing the network into groups so that a connected backbone can be maintained by keeping only one active node in each group and turning off the redundant ones. The scheduling strategy, used by GECP, minimizes the number of transitions between sleep and active states in order to minimize the transition energy and the leader election frequency. The simulation results confirm the efficiency of GECP in terms of energy conservation, connectivity guarantee and network lifetime.