Abstract—The presence of many battery-powered sensors in the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm calls for the design of green and energy-aware protocols. One of the major challenges in the wireless networks based on IoT is to reduce energy consumption and increase network lifetime. This paper addresses the problem of designing a smart sleep/wake-up mechanism using the genetic algorithm (GA). GA, as a nature-inspired optimization approach, is used to manage the operation modes of the base stations (BSs) according to the time-variant profile of the daily traffic load. Accordingly, when a number of stations are sending data to nodes, i.e., active or awake nodes, other nodes are in inactive (sleep) mode. In this case, the energy efficiency (EE) of the network increases to an acceptable level via controlling the operation modes of the densely deployed BSs over wireless sensor networks (WSNs).