Energy-efficient scheduling for multiple access in wireless sensor networks: A job scheduling method

With the objective to minimize the transmission energy cost, we consider the energy-efficient scheduling problem in a single hop multi-access data gathering network. We first prove by theoretical induction that transmitting with reduced powers decreases the energy budget in a multi-access transmission. Given the optimal transmit powers, we then examine the multi-access capacity polymatroid and argue that the optimal rate control can be achieved by controlling the successive decoding order of the transmitting sensor nodes. Consequently, the multi-access scheduling problem is reformulated into the job scheduling problems and solved by adapting job scheduling policies. We also address the implementation issues and demonstrate via simulations that the proposed strategies are efficient in energy conservation.