How to Sleep, Transmit and Page in an Energy Constrained Wireless Sensor Network

In this paper, we minimise a sensor nodes energy consumption by estimating the optimal split between sleep, page receive and transmit modes. By employing a communication theoretic approach we estimate the sleep duty cycle that minimises total energy consumption for a given set of communications requirements. We then introduce practical signalling techniques and re-estimate the duty cycle that minimises the total communications energy. We propose alternative network architectures, that can be used in combination with the estimated duty cycle values for energy constrained access techniques. We provide an initial set of simulation results specifying significant improvement from existing standards and access techniques.