A scheduling scheme for wireless sensor networks based on social insect colonies

Sensor networks employ a large amount of wireless sensor nodes to provide sensing power with high redundancy. Such redundancy makes sensor networks robust under changing environments. However, without proper scheduling, the surplus sensing power will cost tremendous energy consumption to the wireless sensor nodes. A scheduling scheme based on social insect colonies is proposed here. The proposed scheme is a kind of adaptive 'periodic on-off' scheduling scheme that uses only local information for making scheduling decisions. The scheme is evaluated in terms of averaged detection delay, target 3-coverage hit-rate and energy consumption per successful target detection. Simulation results show that, when comparing with other generic scheduling schemes, the proposed scheme can reduce energy consumption from a minimum of 7.49% to a maximum of 90.81% and improve the target hit-rate from a minimum of 15.7% to a maximum of 58.9%. Optimisation of the network lifetime and other performances is possible by adjusting some parameters. © 2009 The Institution of Engineering and Technology.