An efficient sleep/wake-up protocol for localization in impulse wireless sensor networks

Impulse-radio wireless sensor network is a recently proposed concept of wireless sensor network aiming to sense an extended area with high spatial resolution. Extremely simple architecture of the network enables one to install huge number of sensors to the target area. Users of the network are able to precisely estimate location of event-detecting sensor nodes by measuring time of arrivals of impulse signals at anchor nodes. The localization protocol, however, assumes that sensor nodes keep their radio receiver on all the time, which is the main obstacle to reduce energy consumption of the network. To solve the problem, here, we propose a sleep/wake-up protocol of sensor nodes for the network. We show that the protocol can reduces activity of radio receiver of each node by more than 90 % with keeping precision of localization remain intact. We numerically confirm validity of the proposed sleep/wake-up protocol for various conditions including target area with various shape.