Sampling energy consumption in wireless sensor networks

Knowing available energy in each part of a wireless sensor networks (WSN) is undoubtedly essential information. A simple approach to achieve this would be for sensor nodes to periodically report to the sink node on their available energy. This approach is expensive however in terms of energy consumption. In this work we apply several sampling techniques for obtaining such information in WSNs. The results show our samples are representative and the energy map may be satisfactorily built using information from a single subgroup of nodes hence leading to important energy savings.