Energy Consumption Analysis in Adaptive Wireless Sensor Networks

WSNs are characterized by lossy wireless links and severely resource constrained nodes in terms of energy availability and computation capability. Among the resource constraints, energy is probably the most crucial one since sensor nodes are typically battery powered, which limits the operating time of the sensor network. Hence, energy efficiency plays a major role in the design of wireless sense network protocols. In many of these networks, RF operations are sensors’ highest energy-consuming task, and thus, any potential waste must be minimized. In this paper, we discuss how adjusting the node transmission power (P TX ) allows them to comply with energy constraints without impacting quality of service, based on experimental data. We show that P TX has a strong impact (near to 20%) on both the energy consumed by the nodes and the quality/reliability of the communication links. Finally, we propose a methodology to optimize P TX according to link quality metric by taking advantage of the physical energy consumption behaviour analysis.