A bio-inspired scheduling scheme for wireless sensor networks

Sensor networks with a large amount of sensor nodes usually have high redundancy in sensing coverage. The network lifetime can be further extended by proper scheduling and putting unnecessary sensor nodes into sleep mode. In this paper a bio-inspired scheduling scheme is proposed. The proposed scheme is a kind of adaptive "selective on-off" scheduling scheme which uses only local information for making scheduling decisions. The scheme is evaluated in terms of target 3-coverage hit-rate, averaged detection delay, and energy consumption per successful target detection. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can reduce energy consumption by as much as 2/3 when comparing with other generic scheduling schemes while maintaining the detection delay and target hit-rate at a comparable level. Optimization of the network lifetime and other performances is possible by adjusting some parameters.