Energy Efficient Arbitration of Medium Access in Wireless Sensor Networks

Gaurav Jolly and Mohamed Younis Dept. of Computer Science and Elec. Eng. University of Maryland Baltimore County 1000 Hilltop Circle Baltimore, MD 21250 [email protected] and [email protected] Abstract Networking of unattended sensors has become very attractive for many civil and military applications such as disaster management and remote surveillance. Sensors in such applications are usually equipped with radio and operated by limited energy supply. Such energy-constrained environment requires careful design in order to extend the life of the network. Time based arbitration of radio transmission among the sensors is one of the effective techniques for energy conservation since it limits collision and allows for turning off the sensor’s radio circuitry when message reception is not expected. In this paper we propose a Tabu search based time-slot assignment algorithm to reduce energy consumption of the radio and eliminate packet drop due to buffer overflow. This algorithm strives to allocate contiguous transmission (reception) slots to each sensor and thus minimizes both radio’s active time and number of transitions between active and sleep modes. Reported simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of our approach.