A Low-Power, High Reliable Data Collection Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the process of collecting information from sensor nodes is one of the most important key applications. The data collection process in a WSN should meet several requirements, such as high reliability, low power consumption and so forth. In this paper, we introduce a low-power, high-reliability data collection scheme in WSNs using a state-of-the-art IEEE 802.14.4e MAC protocol, which is Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) in combination with the utilization of the feather nodes. Feather nodes are the nodes which have no child nodes. Our proposed method firstly detects all the feather nodes in the network, it then runs a lightweight scheduling mechanism on those nodes. By giving extensive practical experiments on the FIT IoT-LAB platform, we successfully develop a low-power-TSCH, high-reliability data collection scheme. Results in different testbed scenarios show that our scheme achieved good performance, compared to existing models using pure TSCH. That is, the end-to-end delivery ratio achieves 99.99% and the energy consumption of radio listening is 6 and 2 times lower than baseline and Orchestra schemes, respectively.