Aarav Patel
Independent Researcher
India
Abstract
Energy efficiency is paramount in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to the severe limitations of battery-powered sensor nodes. This manuscript reviews and evaluates scheduling techniques developed up to 2016, examining duty-cycling, clustering, TDMA-based, and hybrid approaches. Through detailed case studies of representative protocols—S-MAC, T-MAC, LEACH, and HEED—we identify key performance trade-offs in latency, throughput, and network lifetime. We then delineate research gaps concerning scalability, adaptive scheduling under variable traffic, and cross-layer optimization. A methodology combining analytical modeling and simulation in NS-2 is presented to compare the energy consumption and packet delivery ratio of three scheduling schemes under identical network scenarios. Results demonstrate that adaptive hybrid scheduling outperforms static duty-cycle schemes by up to 30% in network lifetime without sacrificing reliability. Conclusions highlight design guidelines for future protocols and suggest directions for dynamic, context-aware scheduling methods.
Keywords
Energy-efficient scheduling, duty-cycling, TDMA, clustering, wireless sensor networks
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