English

Analysis of Power-aware Buffering Schemes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Networking and Internet Architecture 2011-05-13 v1

Abstract

We study the power-aware buffering problem in battery-powered sensor networks, focusing on the fixed-size and fixed-interval buffering schemes. The main motivation is to address the yet poorly understood size variation-induced effect on power-aware buffering schemes. Our theoretical analysis elucidates the fundamental differences between the fixed-size and fixed-interval buffering schemes in the presence of data size variation. It shows that data size variation has detrimental effects on the power expenditure of the fixed-size buffering in general, and reveals that the size variation induced effects can be either mitigated by a positive skewness or promoted by a negative skewness in size distribution. By contrast, the fixed-interval buffering scheme has an obvious advantage of being eminently immune to the data-size variation. Hence the fixed-interval buffering scheme is a risk-averse strategy for its robustness in a variety of operational environments. In addition, based on the fixed-interval buffering scheme, we establish the power consumption relationship between child nodes and parent node in a static data collection tree, and give an in-depth analysis of the impact of child bandwidth distribution on parent's power consumption. This study is of practical significance: it sheds new light on the relationship among power consumption of buffering schemes, power parameters of radio module and memory bank, data arrival rate and data size variation, thereby providing well-informed guidance in determining an optimal buffer size (interval) to maximize the operational lifespan of sensor networks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1105.2292,
  title  = {Analysis of Power-aware Buffering Schemes in Wireless Sensor Networks},
  author = {Yibei Ling and ChungMin Chen and Shigang Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1105.2292},
  year   = {2011}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:05:56.156Z