Adaptive radio duty cycling in ContikiMAC: Proposal and analysis

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) face several challenges in field deployments due to strict limitations in nodes hardware capabilities and battery capacities. In addition, several environmental factors should be considered while designing or testing a WSN. Energy-efficient operation is one of the prominent challenges for successful deployment of WSN's. In this paper, we consider energy-efficient operation of WSN nodes implementation based on the Contiki real-time operating system. We inspect the effect of applying spatial configuration for the radio duty-cycle (RDC) frequencies of WSN nodes running ContikiMAC. We also propose two temporal update mechanisms namely: a distributed mechanism in which a WSN sink node collects network-wide statistics and broadcasts a threshold value to the nodes to adjust their duty cycles and an autonomous mechanism in which each node individually updates its duty-cycle based on its battery capacity level. Our simulation results show significant gains in network life time while maintaining network delivery ratio at the same level compared with static schemes.