An efficient heuristic for selecting active nodes in wireless sensor networks

Energy saving is a paramount concern in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A strategy for energy saving is to cleverly manage the duty cycle of sensors, by dynamically activating different sets of sensors while non-active nodes are kept in a power save mode. We propose a simple and efficient approach for selecting active nodes in WSNs. Our primary goal is to maximize residual energy and application relevance of selected nodes to extend the network lifetime while meeting application-specific QoS requirements. We formalize the problem of node selection as a knapsack problem and adopt a greedy heuristic for solving it. An environmental monitoring application is chosen to derive some specific requirements. Analyses and simulations were performed and the impact of various parameters on the process of node selection was investigated. Results show that our approach outperforms a naı¨ve scheme for node selection, achieving large energy savings while preserving QoS requirements.