Duty-cycle scheduling for intruder detection in wireless sensor networks

Energy consumption and detection delay are two major concerns in the application of intruder detection in sensor networks, where a low delay and a low energy consumption are hard to achieve at the same time. To address the problem, this paper proposes a novel duty-cycle scheduling scheme that minimizes the detection delay and energy consumption. To guarantee the detection, sensors are divided into shifts which monitor and scan the intruders in a distributed fashion. The scanning is performed by waking up the shifts in each group in turn under planned sequence. Extensive simulations show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing mechanism in terms of detection delay and energy consumption. It also achieves fault-tolerance when sensors fail.