Dynamic Duty Cycle Joint Transmission Power Control Scheme for Delay Minimization in Sensor-based System

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been extensively deployed in diverse domains, serving as a cornerstone technology for the Internet of Things. Minimizing end-to-end latency is crucial for timely event detection and processing. However, existing techniques for optimizing end-to-end latency often achieve limited performance and overlook network lifetime considerations. Therefore, this paper proposes a dynamic Duty Cycle and Transmission Power Control scheme (DCTPC). First, the residual energy of nodes is divided into two parts: one portion is used to increase the node’s duty cycle, while the other is allocated to boost its transmission power, thereby reducing routing delay. Second, theoretical analysis demonstrates that, within a planar WSN, there exists an optimal proportion of residual energy allocation for any given node that yields the minimum end-to-end delay. An approximate optimization algorithm is designed to find this optimal ratio. Third, recognizing that different network applications may have varying requirements for End-to-end delay, an End-to-end delay guarantee scheme (EFFN) based on Fast Forwarding Nodes (FFNs) are proposed. It periodically rotates fast-forwarding nodes based on their residual energy to ensure network longevity and balanced energy consumption. Extensive theoretical analysis and simulation results show that, for the same network lifetime, the proposed approach reduces latency by 60.1% − 78.4% and improves energy efficiency by 16.3% − 56.2% compared with fixed duty cycle or transmission power methods, while outperforming the dynamic duty cycle (DDC) method by lowering latency by 24.3% − 39.7%.