Energy-Aware Activity Control for Wireless Sensing Infrastructure Using Periodic Communication and Mixed-Integer Programming

This paper addresses the energy conservation problem in wireless sensor networks, in which sensor data are aggregated into packages and then transmitted periodically to the base station according to an established schedule. We formulate two mixed integer programming problems, first for minimum total energy usage and second for min-max per node energy usage. We present two algorithms for slot allocation that exploit the periodic nature of the data collection process by allocating a subset of nodes to subsequent frames. A mixed-integer solver solves the resulting mathematical programming task. The performed numerical experiments show that the proposed approach is appropriate for relatively small networks when minimizing the total energy consumption problem. Hopefully, the problem may be solved for medium size networks when a maximum node energy consumption performance index is used.