Building Wireless Sensor Networks

4Energy Management in WSN

4.1 Introduction

A sensor node is a tiny device with basic components like a sensing subsystem for gathering data from the surrounding environment, a processing subsystem for low level local computation and storage, a communication subsystem for wireless transmission and a power subsystem containing the source of energy. However, the power source is generally a battery with limited energy and little provision for recharging. Still it is expected that the sensor network with such resource-constrained nodes will be able to meet the application requirements within its lifetime. Most of the applications require month-long or year-long execution, thereby implying that the wireless sensor network (WSN) should have such a ...