Design of optimal energy aware protocols for wireless sensor networks

We consider a system comprising of a large number of mostly dormant wireless nodes, served by a single base station. Energy conservation is an important issue in such systems. Current power management schemes employ intermittent operation for enhancing the lifetimes of the nodes. In this paper we propose and analyze a class of energy aware protocols. We study average lifetime and cumulative backlog. We then provide approximate results for a particular scheme. We show via simulation that our system performs very favorably compared to a periodic wake-up scheme with geometric back-offs for collision avoidance.