Multi-radio technology is regarded as a promising way to improve the performance of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and has attracted much attention of researchers. It is very important to reduce energy consumption and to prolong the lifetime of Multi-Radio WSNs (MR-WSNs), since the node is generally battery-operated in MR-WSN environments. In this paper, two typical types of energy consumption process, the transmitting energy consumption and idle listening energy consumption, are analyzed firstly. Based on the above analysis, the energy consumption model of multi-radio nodes is built, and then it is considered as the optimization objective for the minimization energy consumption of multi-radio nodes. Furthermore, the heuristic optimal energy consumption task scheduling strategy based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed, and then the detailed steps of the proposed strategy are presented. Finally, the effectiveness and performance of the proposed strategy are evaluated through practical experiments and simulations. Evaluation results show that the proposed strategy outperforms some other algorithms, in terms of energy consumption, network lifetime, and tasks extensibility.
Keywords: energy consumption; multi-radio; particle swarm optimization; task scheduling; wireless sensor networks.