Energy-Efficient Analog Sensing for Large-Scale and High-Density Persistent Wireless Monitoring

The research challenge of current wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to design energy-efficient, low-cost, high-accuracy, self-healing, and scalable systems for applications such as environmental monitoring. Traditional WSNs consist of low density, power-hungry digital motes that are expensive and cannot remain functional for long periods on a single power charge. In order to address these challenges, a dumb-sensing and smart-processing architecture that splits sensing and computation capabilities is proposed. Sensing is exclusively the responsibility of analog substrate-consisting of low-power, low-cost all-analog sensors-that sits beneath the traditional WSN comprising of digital nodes, which does all the processing of the sensor data received from analog sensors. A low-power and low-cost solution for substrate sensors has been proposed using analog joint source-channel coding (AJSCC) realized via the characteristics of metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET). Digital nodes (receiver) also estimate the source distribution at the analog sensors (transmitter) using machine learning techniques so as to find the optimal parameters of AJSCC that are communicated back to the analog sensors to adapt their sensing resolution as per the application needs. The proposed techniques have been validated via simulations from MATLAB and LTSpice to show promising performance and indeed prove that our framework can support large-scale high density and persistent WSN deployment.