Energy and Cost Optimizations in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Abstract

We present a survey of some of the recent work on energy and cost optimizations in wireless sensor networks. Sensor nodes are characterized by severe energy budget due to limited battery life. We focus on two main problem areas, namely routing and design. In sensor networks in which the nodes use multi-hop communication, routing is a major issue. The routing problem in the context of sensor networks retains some of the features of the routing problem in ad-hoc networks, but also has some specific characteristics to it, in particular with respect to data-aggregation, addressing, and the many-to-one paradigm (each sensor node wanting to send the collected data to a single base-station). We first discuss the work done on energy efficient routing, and the corresponding optimization problems for maximizing the lifetime of the network. We then discuss some of the optimization problems in the design and dimensioning of sensor networks. Since most potential applications envisioned for sensor networks require high node density, node heterogeneity and hierarchical clustering could be used for better scalability of the protocols. We discuss the results obtained on energy and cost minimization problems in the context of such clustered sensor networks.