Sleep Scheduling in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks for Toxic Gas Monitoring

Toxic gas leakage that leads to equipment damage, environmental effects, and injuries to humans is the key concern in large-scale industries, particularly in petrochemical plants. Industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) are specially designed for industrial applications with improved efficiency, and remote sensing for toxic gas leakage. Sleep scheduling is a common approach in IWSNs to overcome the network lifetime problem due to energy constrained nodes. In this article, we propose a sleep scheduling scheme that ensures a coverage degree requirement based on the dangerous levels of the toxic gas leakage area, while maintaining global network connectivity with minimal awake nodes. Unlike the previous sleep scheduling algorithm, for example, the connected k-neighborhood (CKN)-based approach that wakes up the sleep nodes over the entire sensing field by increasing the k-value, our proposed scheme dynamically wakes up the sleep nodes only in the particular toxic gas leakage area. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme outperforms the CKN-based sleep scheduling scheme with the same required coverage degree for the toxic gas leakage area. In addition, the proposed scheme considers multiple hazardous zones with various coverage degree requirements. We show that at the expense of a slight extra message overhead, energy consumption in terms of totally awake nodes over the entire sensing field is reduced compared to the other approaches, while maintaining network connectivity. © 2017 IEEE.