An energy-efficient packet aggregation scheme for wireless sensor networks

摘要

Due to limited computing, communication and energy resources, energy efficiency is an important issue in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Backet aggregation schemes, which assemble multiple small packets into a single aggregated larger packet, have been proved to be energy-efficient in WSNs. However, existing schemes may cause energy waste or low Quality-of-Service (QoS) for event-driven communications and multimedia applications in WSNs. To overcome these problems, this paper proposes a new energy-efficient packet aggregation scheme in WSNs, which is formulated as an optimization problem. To solve this problem, we further consider two typical cases as the applications in WSNs can be classified as delay-tolerant applications and delay-intolerant applications from the view of delay occurred in intermediate nodes. We present an asynchronous waiting algorithm for delay-tolerant applications and an adaptive waiting algorithm for delay-intolerant applications. Finally, we conduct extensive simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing ones.