Applying dynamic power management with mode switching in wireless sensor networks

With the latest advances in wireless communication, new monitoring and supervisory control tools have been designed for industrial systems, avoiding unexpected failures and greatly improving system reliability and maintainability. Usually supervisory control for electric systems applies wireless sensor networks (WSN). 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. This paper presents the application of Dynamic Power Management with Mode Switching (DPM-MS) technique into Intelligent Sensor Modules (ISMs). 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. Performance results show that DPM-MS can provide real battery power recovery without compromising the timeliness of the applications running on the sensor network.