Energy Efficiency Improvement of Wireless Sensor Networks in the Digital Age

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) contain spatially distributed sensor nodes that can sense, record, and distribute physical and environmental parameters and are involved in daily life with a large number of applications, such as disaster relief, target tracking, environmental control, smart cities, medicine and health care. A typical wireless sensor network consists of a large number of low-cost, multifunctional sensor nodes that typically run on a limited battery and are deployed to monitor a desired area of interest. The limited energy supply of sensor nodes directly affects the lifetime of the network. As a consequence, energy-efficient modes of operation of WSNs are extremely important to extend the network lifetime, in order to achieve this goal, energy-efficient protocols and algorithms are intensively studied. An insight into previous research related to the security of wireless networks and improving the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks reveals problems related to the lifetime of individual nodes, network reliability and data transmission security, and optimal distribution of the network into clusters. Each of the mentioned protocols brought an improvement in energy conservation, but also opened up additional possibilities for improvement by combining already existing solutions but also by implementing new parameters for sustainable business model and energy efficiency improvement of wireless sensor networks in the digital age that the authors will explore and present in this paper.