Dynamic Duty-Cycle Scheduling Schemes for Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

In this letter, we propose two novel dynamic duty-cycle scheduling schemes (called DSR and DSP) in order to reduce sleep latency, while achieving balanced energy consumption among sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with energy harvesting capability. In DSR, each sensor node is allowed to adjust its duty-cycle according to the current amount of residual energy only. Since the residual energy of nodes in energy-harvesting WSNs can increase over time due to their harvesting opportunity, the estimation of prospective increase in their residual energy is useful to achieve our goal. Hence, DSP allows each of sensor nodes to reduce its duty-cycle more aggressively in proportion to such an increase. Through NS-2 simulations, we verified that our proposed schemes outperform the duty-cycle scheduling scheme used in a representative existing MAC protocol such as RI-MAC.