An adaptive traffic load based scheduling protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network is used for several applications starting from surveillance to health monitoring. Nodes are usually deployed randomly and densely over the monitored region and are supposed to monitor it time to time. The nodes in wireless sensor networks are battery powered and therefore, it is crucial to manage the power consumption of the nodes efficiently. Though most of the existing power-saving protocols minimize the power consumption by periodic sleep and wake up schedules, they fail to adjust a sensor node's sleep duration based on its traffic load. In this paper an adaptive traffic load based node scheduling protocol is proposed to decide the active and sleep schedules of the nodes. The whole network is divided into finite number of virtual zones and a routing path algorithm is designed based on residual energy of the next hop nodes. Simulation results of our protocol shows that the control packet overhead and energy consumption are reduced considerably as compared to similar quorum-based medium access control protocols.