Energy efficient transmission scheduling for infrastructure sensor nodes in location systems

This paper considers a location system where a number of deployed sensor nodes collaborate with objects that need to be localized. Unlike existing works, we focus on reducing the energy consumption of the sensor nodes, which are assumed to be static and run on limited battery power. To minimize the total wake-up time of the sensor nodes, we control the transmission schedule of each object. Because it is difficult to find an optimal solution to the considered optimization problem, we consider an approach to this problem that consists of two steps: (1) create an equivalent modified graph coloring subproblem, and (2) permute the coloring result to obtain a best possible solution. We adopt some existing graph coloring algorithms for step 1 and find two properties of optimal schedules that can be used to confine the search space for step 2. Additionally, we propose a heuristic algorithm that aims at significantly reducing the complexity for the case where the confined search space is still too large. The performance of our heuristic algorithm is evaluated through extensive simulations. It is shown that its performance is comparable to that of the simulated annealing algorithm, which gives a near-optimal solution.