An Adaptive Scheduling Protocol for Multi-scale Sensor Network Architecture

In self-organizing networks of battery-powered wireless sensors that can sense, process, and communicate, energy is the most crucial and scarce resource. However, since sensor network applications generally exhibit specific limited behaviors, there is both a need and an opportunity for adapting the network architecture to match the application in order to optimize resource utilization. Many applications–such as large-scale collaborative sensing, distributed signal processing, and distributed data assimilation–require sensor data to be available at multiple resolutions, or allow fidelity to be traded-off for energy efficiency. We believe that cross-layering and application-specific adaptability are the primary design principles needed to build sensor networking protocols. In previous work, we proposed an adaptive cross-layered self-organizing hierarchical data service under COMPASS architecture, that enables multi-scale collaboration and communication. In this paper we propose a time division multiplexing medium scheduling protocol tailored for this hierarchical data service, to take advantage of the communication and routing characteristics to achieve close to optimal latency and energy usage. We present an analytical proof on the bounds achieved by the protocol and analyze the performance via detailed simulations.