Understanding the Role of Transmission Power in Component-Based Architectures for Adaptive WSN

Component-based architectures can play an important role in solving some of the problems related to energy management in Wireless Sensor Networks. It has been recently shown that real-time interfaces, and their associated mechanisms for online adaptation, are useful for solving the problem of dynamically allocating bandwidth in a WSN, while still satisfying both quality and energy constraints. In this paper we will discuss the relevance of extending this model with a new parameter, the transmission power of the nodes. Based on experimental data, it will be shown that this parameter has a strong impact on both the energy consumed by the nodes and the quality/reliability of the communication. The integration of this feature with the notion real-time interface, although not completely solved, will be discussed as well.