The impact of multiple power levels on the lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks is an important issue, as in many applications replacing batteries is not a viable task. Therefore, it is essential to understand and quantify the amount of energy consumed by each task performed by motes in a network and hence make the best use of the energy available. In this paper, we present a numerical analysis of how the lifetimes of Wireless Sensor Networks are impacted by the use of different transmission power levels. The analysis of different transmission power, which is a novel feature available on some radio modules used in some WSN motes, was motivated by its current application on both academic works and commercial solutions.