if the number of neighboring nodes exceeds the threshold limit the agent evaluates whether the neighboring nodes are also members of an ordered set of nodes the agent performs a two fold determination utilizing the ordered set as will be described below on the basis of such determinations the agent allows the given node to go to sleep or instructs the given node instructions to remain awake while aspects of described techniques relating to sleep scheduling in a distributed network can be implemented in any number of different computing systems environments and or configurations embodiments are described in the context of the following exemplary system architecture s fig1 illustrates an exemplary network 100 in which sleep scheduling can be implemented network 100 includes one or more node devices 102 1 102 2 102 3 102 n each of the nodes in the network 100 is connected to one or more other node devices the node devices or simply u201c nodes u201d can be coupled to each other in various combinations e g lan wan etc through wired and or wireless technologies known in the art in this manner the coupled nodes 102 form a geographically distributed network over which messages signals or other data can be transferred from a source to a destination the distributed network 100 is representative of many diverse implementations such as a cellular network a sensor network of physical sensor devices for example temperature sensors traffic sensors webcams etc and so forth each node device referenced generally as u201c 102 u201d or nodes 102 in the distributed network 100 includes a sleep scheduling agent as represented by the agent 104.