Energy-efficient strategies for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Design of large scale wireless sensor networks WSN has become cost effective with the advances in inexpensive sensor technology and wireless communications and attracts the attention of a wide range of applications such as health and environmental monitoring and battlefields surveillance. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consists of huge number of Sensor Nodes (SNs) with sensing, communication and processing capabilities. SNs have limited energy supply, storage and computational capacity. In recent years energy efficient computation is a major concern in WSN. The critical aspects include reduction in the energy consumption of SNs so that the network lifetime can be extended to reasonable times. For this purpose many novel innovative techniques based on energy efficient computation have been proposed. In this paper, we present a brief analysis on energy efficient computation protocols. We have also presented a comparison of these protocols The main challenge in the design of wireless sensor networks is the limited battery power of the sensors and the difficulty of replacing and/or recharging these batteries due to the nature of the monitoring field and cost to ease this problem it is necessary that the sensors be densely deployed and appropriate protocols be designed in order to identify this redundancy while maximizing the lifetime of the network. Several protocols have been proposed in the literature with a goal to save the sensors energy. All those proposed algorithms aim to design energy efficient protocol for WSN. However these protocols consider the various issues of WSN separately.