Energy consumption in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a promising technology and due to its multitude applications such as remote monitoring, personal medical monitoring and home automation, it has become one of the most interesting tasks in the recent years. A WSN consists of many sensor nodes which sense physical phenomena or collect data from an environment. Depending on a predefined application of a network, sensor nodes can be located in fixed places or distributed randomly over a large geographical area. Their communication with each other occurs wireless and they share a channel for signal transmission. Some parameters such as position, distance, power consumption for each node and communication technology between sensor nodes have inevitable impact over the network’s performance. In spite of a tremendous development, there are still limitations that WSNs suffer. Some challenges like designing a low power network, data security and architecture of network have taken the most attention of researchers in the last years. The energy consumption is one of the most common problems in the wireless sensor network that does not appear in more traditional wired sensor network. Each sensor node is battery operated and it makes a wireless sensor network highly depended on each node battery. It is very important to predict the lifetime of a wireless sensor network before network installation. Our work will be based on analysis of a communication protocol (ZigBee) when the network forms Star and Mesh topologies. The monitor of greenhouse condition is the main concept in our work. The temperature will be measured with sensor nodes, and the sensed data will sent to a remote center. We are looking for the best and most suitable topology in term of low power consumption for this scenario.