Event-driven adaptive duty-cycling in sensor networks

Energy conservation is a major issue in the management of sensor networks. In this paper, we consider the problem of optimising the performance of energy-constrained sensor networks in the context of event detection applications, with the performance metric being a weighted average of the numbers of missed events and false alarms. We propose two adaptive event-driven techniques, both simple to implement at the node level, that change the nodes’ duty cycles based on the patterns of detected events. Simulation results show that this approach is effective in both cutting down wasteful energy consumption as well as in improving the detection performance in applications characterised by long periods of quiescence followed by bursts of activity.