An Energy Efficient Sensor Duty Cycling for Smart Home Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) applications are envisioned in various smart environments such as smart homes, smart cities, e-health, etc. Similarly, in future smart homes, an extensive sensor deployment would be required to control various home resident activities. However, deploying many sensors and operate them continuously requires a high amount of electrical energy. Therefore, in this paper, we presented a solution to prolong the sensors’ battery life by assigning the pre-detected slots to the sensors using Bayesian Network (BN). Among the rest of the Idle Sensors (IS), a Watch Sensor (WS) is selected to detect the upcoming activities and activate the rest of the closely related sensors to the WS. The similarities between IS sensors are modeled using the Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) approach. Finally, an extensive set of simulations is performed in a smart home scenario to test the proposed scheme’s performance. The simulation results show that the proposed approach significantly enhances the sensors’ battery lifetime by scheduling the sensors’ operational time to detect smart home resident activities.