Energy-aware data acquisition in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents an energy-aware data acquisition scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) that integrates Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) and Dynamic Modulation Scaling (DMS) techniques to minimize the total energy consumption within the networks. Applications of data acquisition with real-time constraints are considered in the study. The new scheme achieves energy savings by trading energy against both computation and communication time. The objective is to design a strategy that optimally allocates the limited processing time to computation and communication by adjusting the processor's supply voltage and the radio's modulation level. This leads to a resource allocation problem which exhibited three characteristics: 1) mono-increasing, 2) mono-decreasing, and 3) convex functions which depend on the in-situ condition. By finding the boundaries that distinguish the three cases, a strategy is built that used a simple policy for the first two monotone cases and an optimization approach for the third case. By applying this strategy as the energy-aware scheme, the simulation results demonstrate an average 60 percent energy reduction when compared to a node where no energy-aware technique is used. The ineffectiveness of DVS in high communication tasks is also rectified by incorporating DMS into DVS.