Error Analysis of Scheduling Sleeping Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks

The sleeping technique is one of the most popular ways to save energy of battery powered sensor nodes. Many existing researches on sleeping technique are based on the pre-knowledge of sensor nodes deployment, e.g., a known probability distribution of sensor nodes in the target sensing field. Thus, whether or not a scheduling sleeping scheme has a good performance mostly depend upon the pre-knowledge of sensor nodes deployment. In this paper, we show the discrepancy of scheme performances including energy consumption and network lifetime based on inaccurate pre-knowledge of sensor deployment. Through the analytical studies, we conclude that the discrepancy is very large and can not be neglected. We hence propose a distribution-free approach to study energy consumption. In our approach, no assumption of probability distribution of sensor node deployment is needed. The proposed approach has yielded good estimation of network energy consumption.