Energy Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks: Selected Papers from IEEE PIMRC 2008

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as perhaps the most important networking paradigm of recent times, both in terms of their commercial potential and also from a scientific point of view. WSNs are important commercially because of their many applications, spanning from civil to military applications such as structural monitoring of bridges, monitoring of wildlife, tracking of contaminants in the soil and atmosphere. Some of these applications have already proved to be commercially viable and indeed financially very attractive. WSNs are also very important from a scientific point of view, because of their unique features with respect to other types of wireless networks: nodes are typically immobile, and are required to carry a specific type of traffic (which is advantageous), have extreme restrictions on the energy they consume, the processing power they have, and the antennas they can use (which is disadvantageous); in addition, the data created at different sensors may be strongly correlated, which can be beneficial but requires only good algorithms that take advantage of it. Therefore, in the last few years we have experienced an important shift in research activities, moving from general purpose wireless networks to more focused topics specifically on WSNs, taking into account their specific advantages and peculiarities. An important recurring theme in research in this field is the need for energy efficiency, which is the thread of this special issue. The papers which appear in this issue have been carefully selected from the best IEEE PIMRC 2008 conference papers addressing the issue of energy efficiency in WSNs. The respective authors have been asked to provide a significantly extended version of the conference paper, which has subsequently undergone a rigorous review process according to the IJWIN publication standards prior to acceptance. The final set of papers addresses issues at physical, medium access control and networking layers, and to some extent at the application layer. All of these papers take into account the unique peculiarities, advantages, and shortcomings of wireless sensor networks, and propose algorithms and analyses that significantly advance research in the field. We sincerely hope you will enjoy reading them as much as we did. The author of the first paper ‘‘Power Management and Data Rate Maximization in Wireless Energy Harvesting Sensors’’ by Chandra R. Murthy, deals with the problem of power management and throughput maximization for energy neutral operation when using increasingly important but so far rarely analyzed Energy Harvesting Sensors (EHS) to send data over wireless links. The EHS is assumed to be able to harvest energy at a constant rate, and use a fixed part of the energy harvested in a slot for measuring the channel state. The rest of the harvested energy is available for transmission, but it can also be stored in an Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as perhaps the most important networking paradigm of recent times, both in terms of their commercial potential and also from a scientific point of view. The papers that appear in this issue have been carefully selected from the best IEEE PIMRC 2008 conference papers which addressed the issue of energy efficiency in WSNs. The final set of papers addresses issues at physical, medium access control, networking and to some extend application layers. All of these papers take into account the unique peculiarities, advantages, and shortcomings of wireless sensor networks, and propose algorithms and analyses that significantly advance research in the field. Note that this activity has been partly supported by the NoE-216715 NEWCOM++.