Sleeping management for scalable topology control in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is an important instrument to realize wireless monitoring and control in various application fields. Energy conservation are crucial for WSNs to prolong the network lifetime. In this paper, we study sleeping management schemes which can efficiently control the network topology and significantly reduce the energy consumption by selectively turning off the radios of abundant sensor nodes. Based on the observation that a Matérn Hard‐core Process (MHP) could thin out evenly distributed nodes from a dense graph, we propose Backbone Energy Efficient Sleeping (BEES) management scheme, whose central idea is to generate and maintain the backbone by simulating MHPs. There are three attractive features of BEES: (i) the backbone size could be conveniently scaled according to the practical requirements; (ii) the backbone is energy efficient in the point of view of packet forwarding (or routing); (iii) the construction of backbone is robust to possible ranging errors, which ensures the feasibility and reliability in practice. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments are carried out to demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of BEES. Numerical results indicate that, compared with two existing sleeping management schemes, BEES provides about 30% wider range of scalability, consumes about 13% less routing energy, and achieves 11% ∼ 20% longer network lifetime under different traffic loads.