Power Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

Developments in last about two decades, implementation of low power microcontrollers based wireless sensors have been increased rapidly to solve many real life problems like traffic monitoring, patient monitoring, battlefield surveillance. Wireless sensor nodes are very small in size and are operated at low power for low duty applications to record the desired physical parameters. Sensing, computations, communication are routines of wireless sensor networks, consume much power of these low powered sensor nodes. Since nodes have small battery with a limited life, power management is essential to be addresses to sensors to work for a long time. Wireless sensor networks may have specific sensors to sense the parameters like air pressure, humidity, which generally consume much power, may exhaust sensor node battery rapidly. Hence these power hungry sensors are to addresses by an effective and efficient power management scheme. This paper aims to the introduction of wireless sensor network, node architecture, power issues associated with their routines and application of ZigBee as solution for power management in WSN.