Energy optimal scheduling of multi-channel wireless sensor networks for wireless metering

One of the key applications of low Power wireless sensor networks is wireless metering for smart grid. In such wireless sensor networks, nodes are often battery powered, and hence power is the main constraint for the network. To reduce the power consumption in wireless sensor network with spanning tree structure, data was aggregated from ingresses and send only one aggregated data packet to egress. In this paper we propose an energy efficient algorithm for scheduling each node's transmission in a multi-channel multi-hop wireless sensor network. We formulate the scheduling problem into binary linear equations for the wireless sensor network with given routing topology, and solve the binary linear equations to drive optimal scheduling solution. Simulation results show that the proposed method reduces the power consumption up to 40% compared to a non-optimal scheduling method.