Energy-Efficient Multihop Polling in Clusters of Two-Layered Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

In this paper, the authors study two-layered heterogeneous sensor networks where two types of nodes are deployed: the basic sensor nodes and the cluster head nodes. The basic sensor nodes are simple and have limited power supplies, whereas the cluster head nodes are much more powerful and have many more power supplies, which organize sensors around them into clusters. Such two-layered heterogeneous sensor networks have better scalability and lower overall cost than homogeneous sensor networks. They propose using polling to collect data from sensors to the cluster head since polling can prolong network life by avoiding collisions and reducing the idle listening time of sensors.