Asynchronous random sleeping for sensor networks

Sleeping scheduling is a common energy-conservation solution for sensor networks. For application whereby coordination of sleeping among sensors is not possible or inconvenient, random sleeping is the only option. In this article, we study the asynchronous random sleeping(ARS) scheme whereby sensors (i) do not need to synchronize with each other, and (ii) do not need to coordinate their sleeping schedules. The stationary coverage probability and the expected coverage periods for ARS are derived. For surveillance application, we derive in addition the detection probability and detection delay distribution. The correctness of our results is validated through extensive simulations. We compare ARS with other synchronous and asynchronous sleeping scheduling algorithms and show that ARS offers better performance in terms of detection delay in the lower duty-cycle regime. We also conduct simulations to demonstrate that our results can be a good approximation for clock drifting case.