Channel-aware repetitive data collection in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networking technology has been applied in practice to a variety of information-gathering infrastructures, where sensing data are repetitively delivered to a data collector within a session period. For efficient energy conservation, each sensor node can wait for a higher channel gain before it begins the transmission of sensing data and transmits them with a power that is inversely proportional to the channel gain. However, if the node waits for higher channel gain, switching to the sleeping mode takes a longer time. We formulate this channel-aware data transmission problem using an optimization problem with linear constraints. The numerical simulations indicate that the proposed method significantly reduces the energy consumption compared with other heuristic methods.