Benefits of Dual-Radio Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), energy efficiency is critical, particularly for large-scale deployments. In this paper, we analyze the benefits of using dual-radio, from the perspective of network lifetime, in conjunction with clustering architecture, which is widely adopted for scalability. Two types of radios, which have different property of energy consumption, are used for different purposes. We formulate a condition that warrants the benefits of dual-radio, and evaluate the effectiveness of dual-radio via simulations.