Sleep scheduling mechanism for energy-efficient routing nodes in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), most sleep scheduling mechanisms are designed for resource-constrained terminal nodes and few sleep schemes are optimized for routing nodes. In this paper, we present a sleep scheduling mechanism for the routing nodes and their next hop neighbors. According to the number and sleep cycles of next hop neighbors, the routing nodes can set their own sleep cycles by an adaptive sleep cycle algorithm with the purpose of minimizing the energy consumption of the routing nodes as well as reducing their next hop neighbors' energy consumption. The test results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism prolongs the network lifetime effectively and is suitable for different scenarios.