Maximum Lifetime Routing Problem in Duty-Cycling Sensor Networks

In order to extend the lifetime of a wireless sensor network, the energy consumption of individual sensor nodes need to be minimized. This can be achieved by minimizing the idle listening time with duty cycling mechanism and/or minimizing the number of communications per node. The nodes will have different relay loads for different routing strategies: therefore, the routing problem is important factor in minimization of the number of communications per node. In this paper, we investigate achievable network lifetime with a routing mechanism on top of an existing duty-cycling scheme. To this end, we formulated the routing problem for duty-cycling sensor network as a linear programming problem with the objective of maximizing the network lifetime. Using the developed linear programming formulation, we investigate the relationship between network lifetime and duty-cycling parameter for different data generation rates and determine the minimum duty-cycling parameter that meets the application requirements. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first mathematical programming formulation which addresses the maximum lifetime routing problem in duty-cycling sensor network. In order to illustrate the application of the analytical model, we solved the problem for different parameter settings.