Abstract
It is believed that the deployments of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) have great long-term economic potential, ability to transform our lives, and pose many new system-building challenges. A typical application domain of WSN is by placing a vast number of multifunctional sensor nodes over a field to sense and collect surrounding environment data. Beside energy conservation concerns, another major challenge for its real deployments is its reliability issue, more precisely the sensing resolution (this being the main service quality we addressed in this paper). In many cases, redundancy of sensors is being made to provide higher sensing resolution when single sensing device is with lower ability. Certain coverage of sensors is required in order to guarantee the sensing data with acceptable degree-of-truth. However, since sensor nodes are mostly powered by batteries and required to remain in inactive state for the longest possible time duration due to save energy. Balancing the trade-off between energyefficiency and sensing quality is a rich area because sensor deaths and sensor replenishments make it difficult to specify the optimum number of sensors that should be activated and sending information at any given time. Through literature survey, we discover that current solutions toward this problem fell into some limitations in configurations or deployments. In this paper, we present a concept for improving the overall performance of the WSNs through local collaborations of neighbour nodes, and provide a more efficient duty-cycle management solution. A framework for distributed duty-cycle management is given, and a control algorithm is generated from the framework. Simulation shows that the new method does work in WSN environments, and gives good results.