Managing the power resources of sensor networks with performance considerations

A power management algorithm that schedules the time off intervals for nodes in sensor networks while maintaining network connectivity is proposed. The scheduling problem is formally formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem and is shown to be intractable. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared to an optimum integer linear programming formulation. It is shown that its performance is very close to the optimum solutions for small instances. The experimental results also show that the proposed heuristic performs better than the ASAP and the sleep and listen component of the S-MAC protocol in terms of delay, throughput and energy savings.