An Energy-Efficient Scheduling Algorithm with SIC and Power Control in WSNs

In large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs), spectrum efficiency and energy consumption are two challengeable problems to be solved due to the increasing traffic requirement and its limited energy. Successive interference cancellation (SIC) technology, which supports multiple parallel transmissions, gives an opportunity to improve the efficiency of data collection. However, those classical schemes suffer from high energy consumption, which presents a severe challenge to energy-constrained WSNs. To improve the transmission and energy efficiency of WSNs, we study an energy-efficient scheduling algorithm joint with SIC and power control in this paper. We first develop a non-uniform M-Level scheduling model to identify the beneficial opportunities and guarantee the transmission quality of SIC concurrency. Then, we formulate an energy efficiency maximization scheduling (EEMS) utility and further transform it into a combinatorial optimization problem. To reduce the computational complexity and obtain meaningful insights, two low-complexity optimization algorithms are proposed from the perspective of SIC scheduling and power control, respectively. Finally, extensive results demonstrate that the SIC scheduling design enables our proposed algorithm to achieve 51% higher throughput than the algorithm without SIC. Moreover, the energy efficiency of our proposed algorithm is improved by 37% compared with the existing algorithms, which indicates that our algorithm can search for the optimal configuration of SIC-concurrent transmissions and better manage the concurrent transmission power.