Reliable Lifespan Evaluation of a Remote Environment Monitoring System Based on Wireless Sensor Networks and Global System for Mobile Communications

The use of wireless sensor networks (WSN) for monitoring physical and chemical variables in large areas allows density and frequency measurements which have been unavailable to date in classical measurement systems. To fully take advantage of this technology in a particular application, besides an accurate design and selection of all the components involved in its operation, it is essential to dispose of reliable lifetime estimation prior to deployment. This paper presents an experimental approach to determine the actual lifetime of such battery-operated systems, making use of a custom WSN architecture, and for different batteries technologies. To render a reliable evaluation, the energy consumption of the sensor nodes under their different operation modes, in correlation with the battery characteristics and the voltage regulation system, is jointly considered. The result is a complete and practical lifetime model, whose appropriate performance has been validated in a real deployment scenario.