Joint Cluster Routing and Sleep-Awake Scheduling for Energy-Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency has become an important research issue for wireless sensor networks. Sensor nodes, thus, need to make use of their limited energy to keep active time as small as possible to prolong the whole network lifetime while meeting the performance requirement. In this work, we reinvestigate the overhearing problem, which occurs when an awake node overhears the transmission nearby; and this introduces unnecessary energy cost at the overhearing node. To cope with this issue and alleviate repeated sampling problem, we propose a cross-layer cluster routing and scheduling protocol, which jointly considers the properties of MAC layer, network layer, and application data of WSNs. That is, we group the nodes nearby that can communicate with the same neighbors and sense similar data into a cluster and let those nodes cooperatively prolong their lifetime. We implement the proposed protocol on TinyOS and do the simulations with TOSSIM. Both experimental and simulation results show that our proposed protocol can prolong the network lifetime up to 3x over ALPL and BMAC.