Stochastic sleeping with sink‐oriented connectivity and coverage in large‐scale sensor networks

Maintaining a long network lifetime with stringent energy constraints on tiny sensor nodes presents a big challenge for the design of wireless sensor networks. A widely used energy consumption strategy is to turn off a node when it is transmitting or receiving. However, most existing scheduling algorithms depend on location or directional information. As a result, the energy cost and system complexity involved in obtaining such geometric information may compromise the effectiveness as a whole. In this paper, we analyse the shortcomings of geographic scheduling schemes maintaining a complete coverage and prove that the network lifetime is determined by the boundary nodes. We propose a probabilistic cellular automaton scheduling scheme, which does not need any node location or directional information and also provide a topology control protocol (S3C2), which schedules a node to sleep based on probabilistic cellular automaton and maintains a sink‐oriented connectivity and coverage. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of our proposed scheduling scheme and topology control protocol. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.