Sleep Scheduling for Critical Event Monitoring in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network have used in many applications like forest fire detection, earth monitoring, air monitoring etc. When a critical event happen in the monitoring area it is find out by a sensor node. In this paper, we focus on critical event monitoring in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where only a small number of packets need to be transmitted most of the time. When a critical event occurs, an alarm message should be broadcast to the entire network as soon as possible. To prolong the network lifetime, some sleep scheduling methods are always employed in WSNs, resulting in significant broadcasting delay, especially in large scale WSNs. In this paper, we propose a novel sleep scheduling method to reduce the delay of alarm broadcasting from any sensor node in WSNs. Specifically, we design two determined traffic paths for the transmission of alarm message, and level-by-level offset based wake-up pattern according to the paths, respectively. When a critical event occurs, an alarm is quickly transmitted along one of the traffic paths to a center node, and then it is immediatelybroadcast by the center node along another path without collision.