Experimental evaluation of an Adaptive Staggered Sleep Protocol for wireless sensor networks

In the last years wireless sensor networks (WSN) have emerged as an enabling technology for a wide range of applications. The main challenge in the deployment and actual utilization of WSNs is the scarce energy budget available at sensor nodes. In this paper we address this problem through an Adaptive Staggered Sleep Protocol (ASLEEP) which is suitable to environmental monitoring applications. By tuning dynamically the wakeup period of each sensor node to its current traffic pattern, ASLEEP reduces both energy consumption and message latency. In addition, it can adapt to changes in the operating conditions. We present an experimental evaluation of ASLEEP based on a prototype implementation in a real testbed. The experimental results show that the proposed solution provides better performance, in terms of reduced energy consumption and message latency, in comparison with other similar approaches.