Analysis of Latency in Finite Duty Cycling Wireless Networks

Sleep-wake scheduling (or duty cycling) of radio transceivers is a well-known technique for achieving energy conservation in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. While putting nodes to sleep for certain durations of time saves energy since they cannot transmit, receive or listen, it also results in lower throughput capacity in the network and increased packet latency. At low rates of duty cycling, packets may have to wait at intermediate nodes in a multi-hop path before reaching the destination and thus may incur significant end-to-end latency. In this paper, the authors investigate how latency between source and destination nodes varies with parameters such as wakeup probability in a slot, p and size of the multi-hop network, n.