Dynamic power management in a wireless sensor network using predictive control

Technological advances have made wireless sensor nodes cheap and reliable enough to be brought into various application domains. These nodes are powered by battery, thus they have a limited lifespan which is a major drawback for their acceptance. This paper addresses a power consumption control problem of wireless nodes equipped with batteries. Dynamic power management is used to dynamically re-configure the set of sensor nodes in order to provide given services and performance levels with a minimum number of active nodes and/or a minimum load on such components. The power control formulation is based on model predictive control with constraints and binary optimization variables, leading to a mixed integer quadratic programming problem. Simulations are performed to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed control method.