Link scheduling for data collection in multichannel wireless sensor networks

Data collection is a fundamental operation in many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. Many previous works discuss how to schedule nodes’ active and sleep timings to conserve energy and reduce report latency. Recently, some previous works propose to utilize multiple channels to facilitate scheduling. When the network has multiple channels, the report latency can be further reduced since the interferences between transmission pairs can be eliminated. In this work, we consider the network scenarios that there are sufficient channels, and propose a two-phase algorithm. In our algorithm, we first assign slot to transmission pairs and then assign channels to nodes. The assignment sequence is so designed based on some observations on previous works. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the report latency and the needed numbers channels for multichannel WSNs.