Trade-Offs between Energy Saving and Reliability in Low Duty Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks Using a Packet Splitting Forwarding Technique

One of the challenging topics and design constraints in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is the reduction of energy consumption because, in most application scenarios, replacement of power resources in sensor devices might be unfeasible. In order to minimize the power consumption, some nodes can be put to sleep during idle times and wake up only when needed. Although it seems the best way to limit the consumption of energy, other performance parameters such as network reliability have to be considered. In a recent paper, we introduced a new forwarding algorithm for WSNs based on a simple splitting procedure able to increase the network lifetime. The forwarding technique is based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem and exhibits very good results in terms of energy efficiency and complexity. In this paper, we intend to investigate a trade-off between energy efficiency and reliability of the proposed forwarding scheme when duty-cycling techniques are considered too.