Rollout Algorithm Based Duty Cycle Control with Joint Optimisation of Delay and Energy Efficiency for Beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4 Networks

Duty cycle control is applied in IEEE 802.15.4 medium access control (MAC) protocol to reduce energy consumption. A low duty cycle improves the energy efficiency but it reduces the available transmission time, thereby increases the end-to-end delay. Thus, it is a challenge issue to achieve a good trade-off between energy efficiency and delay. In this paper, we study a duty cycle control problem with the aim of minimising the joint-cost of energy consumption and end-to-end delay. By applying dynamic programming (DP), the optimal duty cycle control is derived. Furthermore, to ensure the feasibility of implementing the control on computation limited sensor devices, a low complexity rollout algorithm based duty cycle control (RADutyCon) is proposed. The joint-cost upper bound of the proposed RADutyCon is investigated. Simulation results show that RADutyCon can effectively reduces the joint-cost of energy consumption and end-to-end delay under various network traffic. In addition, RADutyCon achieves an exponential reduction of computation complexity compared with DP optimal control.