In order to show the gap between theory and practice, this paper first gives some experimental results for theoretical and real neighbor sets on a test-bed sensor network. The results prove that existing management protocols (e.g., duty-cycling, routing or aggregation) based on the theoretical communication radius cannot achieve their original goal, efficiency. In this paper, we present a practical duty-cycling mechanism based on the real neighbor set, allowing for energy-efficiency. It also guarantees to suppress duplicated transmissions of sensing values with similarity within a specific threshold in each zone (i.e., a portion of intended divided network). Simulation results performed with a set of real sensor data show that our mechanism increases the network life time while guaranteeing the transmission of necessary sensing values.