ActSee: Activity-Aware Radio Duty Cycling for Sensor Networks in Smart Environments

In this paper we present ActSee, an activity-aware radio duty cycling protocol that utilizes the learned event activity pattern information to intelligently adjust radio duty cycles in wireless sensor networks. The goal is to minimize data delivery latency and maximize throughput, while still conserving energy in the network. Based on the collected intelligence about activity patterns in the form of an Activity Transition Probability Graph (ATPG), the ActSee protocol solves a linear programming problem to select the duty cycles for a set of sensor nodes. The non-uniform and dynamic duty cycle assignments are distributed by the active node(s) in a defined neighborhood. As a case study, we have evaluated ActSee using the activity patterns from a real Smart Home testbed CASAS [1]. Experimental results from both real sensor network testbed and the sensor network simulator TOSSIM validate that our proposed activity-aware radio duty cycling protocol outperforms traditional MAC protocols, uniform duty cycling and reactive duty cycling strategies in terms of data delivery latency, throughput and network lifetime.