A Two-Stage Scheduling To Improve Capacity For Inter-Concentrator Communication In Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we focus on two-layer wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that consist of sensor-concentrator and inter-concentrator networks. In order to collect as much data as possible from a wide area, improving of network capacity is essential because data collection applications often require to gather data within a limited period, i.e., acceptable collection delay. Therefore, we propose a two-stage scheduling method for inter-concentrator networks. The proposed method first strictly schedules time slots of links with heavy interference and congestion by exploiting the combination metric of interference and traffic demand. After that, it simply schedules time slots of the remaining sinks to mitigate complexity. Simulation-based evaluations show our proposal offers much larger capacity than conventional scheduling algorithms. In particular, our proposal improves up to 70% capacity compared with the conventional methods in situations where the proportion of one-and two-hop links is small.