ILA: Idle Listening Avoidance in Scheduled Wireless Sensor Networks

There are applications that require a lifetime of several years from a sensor network and simultaneously need a guaranteed end-to-end delay. Obviously, these two parameters - lifetime and delay - contradict each other. In this work we present and evaluate a solution - Idle Listening Avoidance (ILA) - that copes with idle listening stemming from the delay between detecting that no message is transmitted and switching off the transceiver. ILA reduces idle listening from 50 to even more than 100 times, depending on the guaranteed end-to-end delays. As a result, it prolongs the lifetime by more than 50%. Moreover, the ideal solution, which requires a dedicated hardware, prolongs the lifetime by only 0.3% more than ILA, which can be applied on off-the-shelf sensor nodes.