Contents I. Introduction
Usage of wireless monitoring sensors keeps increasing in recent years across multiple areas such as environmental observation and protection [1], health [2], traffic control [3][4], industrial production [5], agriculture, energy [6], security, military [7], etc., thanks to their flexibility in deployment, high customizability, and ease of operation on a large scale and in complex environments. In practice, the use of wireless sensor networks usually requires the nodes’ ability to customize the schedules, which ensure the flexibly to suit different applications and optimization problems [8], and at the same time energy saving. On the other hand, nodes also need the ability to harvest energy from the ambient environment to ensure long-term viability for themselves as well as the entire network. However, the schedule optimization features have not been given adequate attention and is a practical problem when applying wireless sensor networks. In this study, wireless sensor nodes with the ability to customize the operation based on a schedule optimization scheme with help of a so-called variable-length chromosome genetic algorithm (VLC GA) [8] is introduced. The principal objective is to design a sensor node with different operating modes such as sleep, idle, measurement and communication, etc., which correspond to different power consumption levels. These modes are customizable with preset time intervals that are determined by the optimization procedure on the basis of the user application’s requirements.
