Data Collection for Time-Critical Applications in the Low-Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks

In low-duty-cycle wireless sensor networks, wireless nodes usually have two states: active state and dormant state. The necessary condition for a successful wireless transmission is that both the sender and the receiver are awake. In this paper, we study the problem: How fast can raw data be collected from all source nodes to a sink in low-duty-cycle WSNs with general topology? Both the lower and upper tight bounds are given for this problem. We use TDMA scheduling on the same frequency channel and present centralized and distributed fast data collection algorithms to find an optimal solution in polynomial time when no interfering links happen. If interfering links happen, multichannel scheduling is introduced to eliminate them. We next propose a novel Receiver-based Channel and Time Scheduling (RCTS) algorithm to obtain the optimal solution. Based on real trace, extensive simulations are conducted and the results show that the proposed RCTS algorithm is significantly more efficient than the link schedule on one channel and achieves the lower bound. We also evaluate the proposed data collection algorithms and find that RCTS is time-efficient and suffices to eliminate most of the interference in both indoor and outdoor environment for moderate size networks.