Reduced-Feedback Scheduling Policies for Energy-efficient MAC

Energy efficiency is a critical requirement in low-power wireless sensor networks. In this work, energy-efficient scheduling policies that exploit the temporal variation of wireless channel are presented. The proposed policies avoid regular feedback from the sensor nodes in order to decide on the channel access opportunity and the access duration. The policies cater to delay-tolerant as well as delay-constrained scenarios. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed policies simultaneously offer a gain of about 20% in data throughput and about 58% in energy efficiency over the nearest competitive approaches. It is also shown that the performance of the scheduling policy corresponding to the delay-constrained scenario is bounded by the policy corresponding to the delay-unconstrained scenario.