In the last years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained increasing attention from both the research community and actual users. As sensor nodes are generally battery-powered devices, the critical aspects to face concern how to reduce the energy consumption of nodes, so that the network lifetime can be extended to reasonable times. In this paper we first break down the energy consumption for the components of a typical sensor node, and discuss the main directions to energy conservation in WSNs. Then, we present a systematic and comprehensive taxonomy of the energy conservation schemes, which are subsequently discussed in depth. Special attention has been devoted to promising solutions which have not yet obtained a wide attention in the literature, such as techniques for energy efficient data acquisition. Finally we conclude the paper with insights for research directions about energy conservation in WSNs.

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Energy conservation in wireless sensor networks: A survey

Sensor networks with battery-powered nodes can seldom simultaneously meet the design goals of lifetime, cost, sensing reliability and sensing and transmission coverage. Energy-harvesting, converting ambient energy to electrical energy, has emerged as an alternative to power sensor nodes. By exploiting recharge opportunities and tuning performance parameters based on current and expected energy levels, energy harvesting sensor nodes have the potential to address the conflicting design goals of lifetime and performance. This paper surveys various aspects of energy harvesting sensor systems- architecture, energy sources and storage technologies and examples of harvesting-based nodes and applications. The study also discusses the implications of recharge opportunities on sensor node operation and design of sensor network solutions.

Energy Harvesting Sensor Nodes: Survey and Implications

Power Aware Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The distributed nature and dynamic topology of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) introduces very special requirements in routing protocols that should be met. The most important feature of a routing protocol, in order to be efficient for WSNs, is the energy consumption and the extension of the network's lifetime. During the recent years, many energy efficient routing protocols have been proposed for WSNs. In this paper, energy efficient routing protocols are classified into four main schemes: Network Structure, Communication Model, Topology Based and Reliable Routing. The routing protocols belonging to the first category can be further classified as flat or hierarchical. The routing protocols belonging to the second category can be further classified as Query-based or Coherent and non-coherent-based or Negotiation-based. The routing protocols belonging to the third category can be further classified as Location-based or Mobile Agent-based. The routing protocols belonging to the fourth category can be further classified as QoS-based or Multipath-based. Then, an analytical survey on energy efficient routing protocols for WSNs is provided. In this paper, the classification initially proposed by Al-Karaki, is expanded, in order to enhance all the proposed papers since 2004 and to better describe which issues/operations in each protocol illustrate/enhance the energy-efficiency issues.

Energy-Efficient Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Recently, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have attracted lot of attention due to their pervasive nature and their wide deployment in Internet of Things, Cyber Physical Systems, and other emerging areas. The limited energy associated with WSNs is a major bottleneck of WSN technologies. To overcome this major limitation, the design and development of efficient and high performance energy harvesting systems for WSN environments are being explored. We present a comprehensive taxonomy of the various energy harvesting sources that can be used by WSNs. We also discuss various recently proposed energy prediction models that have the potential to maximize the energy harvested in WSNs. Finally, we identify some of the challenges that still need to be addressed to develop cost-effective, efficient, and reliable energy harvesting systems for the WSN environment.

Energy harvesting in wireless sensor networks: A comprehensive review

ith the proliferation in sensor nodes and the development in wireless communication technologies, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have gained worldwide attention in recent years. They facilitate monitoring and controlling of physical environments from remote locations with great accuracy and represent a significant improvement over wired sensor networks. WSNs are employed in a vast variety of fields, such as: environmental monitoring (e.g., temperature, humidity), monitoring disaster areas providing relief, file exchange, conferencing, home, health (monitoring patients and assisting disabled patients), commercial applications including managing inventory and monitoring product quality and military purposes. Their function is to collect and disseminate critical data, while their position does need to be engineered or predetermined, in contrast to the wired ones. This allows random deployment in inaccessible terrains or disaster relief operations. On the other hand, this also means that WSN protocols and algorithms must possess self-organizing capabilities [1]. Realization of the wireless sensor network applications requires wireless ad-hoc networking techniques. Although a great number of protocols and algorithms have been proposed for wireless ad-hoc networks, they are not well-suited to the unique features and application requirements of WSNs for the following reasons: • The topology of a WSN changes very frequently. • The number of sensor nodes in a WSN can be several orders of magnitude higher than the number of sensor nodes in a wireless ad-hoc network. • Sensor nodes are densely deployed in a sensor field • Sensor nodes mainly use a broadcast communication paradigm, whereas most wireless ad-hoc networks are based on point-to-point communications. • Sensor nodes may not have global identification due to their large amount of overhead and large number of sensors in the WSN. • Sensor nodes are limited in power, computational capacity and memory. This last requirement is the primary limitation of the WSNs. Their survivability, as it has already been mentioned, depends on power control and power management of the consumed energy, as well as on network connectivity. Considerable research has been focused at overcoming the deficiencies of energy consumption of the sensor nodes, guaranteeing the sensor network's existence and increasing the sensor network's lifetime in such energy-constrained environments through more power control schemes regarding resource allocation, routing and low-energy consumption. This survey attempts to provide an overview of these issues as well as the solutions proposed in recent literature. ABSTRACT A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is actually composed of a large number of very small …

A survey on power control issues in wireless sensor networks

Power saving is a very critical issue in energy-constrained wireless sensor networks. Many schemes can be found in the literature, which have significant contributions in energy conservation. However, these schemes do not concentrate on reducing the end-to-end packet delay while at the same time retaining the energy-saving capability. Since a long delay can be harmful for either large or small wireless sensor networks, this paper proposes a TDMA-based scheduling scheme that balances energy-saving and end-to-end delay. This balance is achieved by an appropriate scheduling of the wakeup intervals, to allow data packets to be delayed by only one sleep interval for the end-to-end transmission from the sensors to the gateway. The proposed scheme achieves the reduction of the end-to-end delay caused by the sleep mode operation while at the same time it maximizes the energy savings.

Energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks using sleep mode TDMA scheduling

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) facilitate monitoring and controlling of physical environments from remote locations with the best possible accuracy. Sensor networks are wireless networks consisting of groups of small, inexpensive nodes, which collect and disseminate critical data. Also, sensor nodes have various energy and computational constraints due to their inexpensive nature and ad hoc method of deployment. Considerable research has been focused on overcoming these deficiencies through low-energy consumption schemes. Among other factors, the route selection strategy may have an impact on the sensors lifetime, and following on the network lifetime. In this paper, we study various route selection strategies that aim at prolonging the lifetime of WSNs. Also, a new route selection scheme is proposed, that increases further the network lifetime. The performance of these schemes is analyzed through simulation.

Energy-efficient route selection strategies for wireless sensor networks

The domain of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is one of the most rapidly growing scientific fields. This is because not only the technological advances have enabled the development of advanced sensor nodes with extremely low cost but the potential applications of such structures are ever growing too. WSNs differ from traditional wireless communication networks in several of their characteristics. One of them is power awareness, due to the fact that the batteries of sensor nodes have a restricted lifetime and are difficult to be replaced. Therefore, all protocols must be designed in such a way as to minimize energy consumption and preserve the longevity of the network. That is why, routing protocols in WSNs aim mainly to accomplish power conservation while in traditional networks they focus primarily on the quality of service (QoS). Recent advances in WSNs have led to many new protocols specifically designed for sensor networks where energy awareness is an essential issue. This work suggests the development of such hierarchical routing protocol, named SHPER (scaling hierarchical power efficient routing), which proves to be particularly effective.

Hierarchical energy efficient routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have their own unique nature of distributed resources and dynamic topology. This introduces very special requirements that should be met by the proposed routing protocols for the WSNs. A Wireless Sensor Network routing protocol is a standard which controls the number of nodes that come to an agreement about the way to route packets between all the computing devices in mobile wireless networks. Today, wireless networks are becoming popular and many routing protocols have been proposed in the literature. Considering these protocols we made a survey on the WSNs energy-efficient routing techniques which are used for Health Care Communication Systems concerning especially the Flat Networks Protocols that have been developed in recent years. Then, as related work, we discuss each of the routing protocols belonging to this category and conclude with a comparison of them.

Nikolaos A. Pantazis

Papers

A survey on power control issues in wireless sensor networks

Energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks using sleep mode TDMA scheduling

Energy-efficient route selection strategies for wireless sensor networks

Hierarchical energy efficient routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy-efficient routing protocols in wireless sensor networks for health communication systems