Exploring the Switching Energy Effect in a Dynamic Power Management Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) comprises many sensor nodes each one containing a processing unit, one or more sensors, a power unit, and a radio for data communication. Nodes are power constrained, because they run on batteries, that in many cases cannot be easily replaced. In this paper present a novel dynamic power management technique, named Dynamic Power Management with Mode Switching (DPM-MS), derived from a more realistic analysis of the battery capacity recovery effect and the switching energy. This was only possible thanks to the application of a more realistic battery model (i.e., Rakhmatov-Vrudhula battery model). Preliminary results showed the potential for improving the battery lifetime by taking advantage of the battery recovery effect when a node transitions to a sleeping state, and mostly when transitions are scheduled after packet transmissions. Simulations results show that DPM-MS can provide real battery power recovery without compromising the timeliness of the applications running on the sensor network.