Optimal message bundling with delay and synchronization constraints in wireless sensor networks

Energy efficiency and end-to-end delay are two of the major requirements for the monitoring and detection applications based on resource-constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs). As new advanced technologies for accurate monitoring and detection-such as device-free wireless sensing schemes for human activity and gesture recognition-have been developed, time synchronization accuracy becomes an important requirement for those WSN applications too. Message bundling is considered one of the effective methods to reduce the energy consumption for message transmissions in WSNs, but bundling more messages increases the transmission interval of bundled messages and thereby their end-to-end delays; the end-to-end delays need to be maintained within a certain value for time-sensitive applications like factory monitoring and disaster prevention, while the message transmission interval affects time synchronization accuracy when the bundling includes synchronization messages as well. Taking as an example a novel WSN time synchronization scheme recently proposed for energy efficiency, we investigate an optimal approach for message bundling to reduce the number of message transmissions while maintaining the user-defined requirements on end-to-end delay and time synchronization accuracy. Formulating the optimal message bundling problem as integer linear programming, we compute a set of optimal bundling numbers for the sensor nodes to constrain their link-level delays, thereby achieving and maintaining the required end-to-end delay and synchronization accuracy. Extensive experimental results based on a real WSN testbed using TelosB sensor nodes demonstrate that the proposed optimal bundling could reduce the number of message transmissions about 70% while simultaneously maintaining the required end-to-end delay and time synchronization accuracy.