A glance on WSN lifetime and relevant factors for energy consumption

The lifetime of wireless sensor nodes and implicit of the network they form is one of the elements driving the WSN design. There is also a related metric used during network employment, time to live, which has a major impact in selecting predefined strategies for nodes behavior. Although the energy consumption, the most important thing behind that metric, has influence on all the node components, the actual research mainly focuses on development of application oriented energy efficient functionalities and many authors use a less accurate energy approach for modules they did not concentrate on. Through this paper we try to gather the relevant factors for energy consumption that need to be taken into account with high accuracy regardless the analyzed component or functionality, and propose some relations for lifetime estimations based on identified factors which can be also utilized in energy balancing strategies.