Energy Concern in

Wireless Sensor Network

Xiujuan Yi
Prof. Nalini Venkatasubramanian
12/10/2010

motivation
Energy has been an important concern among
wireless sensor network community.
Applications usually require WSN to have a long
lifetime. While traditionally sensor nodes are powered
by batteries with limited energy and changing battery
is a bad idea since it's costly, infeasible even
impossible(hazardous place like volcano), people turn
their attention to other solutions...

Energy concern in WSN

Low energy design
Energy harvesting
Using mobile nodes
Energy transference
Player/Stage

Low Energy Design

Battery-powered
Finite lifetime

Replacement cost

Hazardous environment

Goal:Use the battery efficiently----Minimize energy

consumption or maximize lifetime while meeting required
performance constraints[1]
Scheme:low power-hardware design, topology
management[2], routing protocols[3]

Energy concern in WSN

Low energy design
Energy harvesting
Using mobile nodes
Energy transference
Player/Stage

Energy Harvesting
Ambient energy-powered[13]

Solar

spatio-temporal dynamic and constantly changing

Thermal

Kinetic

Vibration

Wind ....

Energy Harvesting
Goal:
1.maximize lifetime
2.how to achieve optimal use of harvested energy(maximize
performance, keep constant quality level etc. subjected to
harvested energy)
Scheme:
Predict energy availability[4]
Routing protocol[7]
Tradeoff between energy and quality[5,6]

Energy concern in WSN

Low energy design
Energy harvesting
Using mobile nodes
Energy transference
Player/Stage

Mobile nodes
Mobile nodes' roles
Harvest data(Mobile sink/data collector)

{multi-hop, cluster-based}
Harvest energy(Energy deliverer)

Mobile relay(router)

Sensing

......

Mobile sink

Mobile robots
Traverse the network, collect
data from nearby nodes, then
upload data to the base station.

1.sparsely deployed large scale

nodes[14]
2.dense network want long
lifetime

The other two data collection schemes [8]

multi-hop
sensors close to the sink consume
more energy

Clustering(hierarchy)
more powerful cluster heads

Sink Mobility: good and bad

good[10]

Ensure the quality of link

between robot and sensor
node.
Low energy consumption in
sensor node

bad

Long latency

Large sensor buffer

Passing Obstacles on the path

Etc.

Sensors could be designed

simple and cheap
Recharging robots is much
easier

robot

Sink Mobility
Applications using mobile sink could be summarized as follows:

multi-robot/single robot

Robots communicate or not

Sensors communicate or not (multi-hop/single hop/zero-hop)

How do robots move?

Mobility schemes[9]: random,
predictable,
controlled

How sensors collaborate with robots?

When to wake up?

An classification of robots' path in[9]

Robots' mobility scheme:controlled

Problem formation:
With the knowledge of location of the static sensors, define a list of
points the robot(s) should visit and the order to visit them.
TSP
Integral Programming
Hamiltonian Path

Papers on mobile sink

controlled

1.Power-efficient real-time data collection using mobile robots

(single-hop, clustering-based and MST-based approach)
2.Sencar: an energy efficient data gathering mechanism for large
scale multi-hop networks (allow data relayed by sensors, with
location information, clustering.)
3.Robot-assisted energy-efficient data collection from high-fidelity
sensor networks (event-triggered sensing, short message informing
the base station that there is data to be retrieved, BS notify robots,
robots begin its traverse(TSP).)
4.NCPS at ISR (multi-robots collaborate to collect data in static
sensors, serve their framework)

Radom

Exploiting mobility for energy efficient data collection in WSN(singlehop. Mules send out discovery message to discover sensors.)

Energy deliverer
Mohammad Rahimi, Hardik Shah, etc. studying the feasibility of
energy harvesting in a mobile sensor network proceedings of the
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation,2003
detect energy imbalance among static nodes and even them out
using rechargeable robots
robots send query to the network to find out the static nodes that
needs service, sensors that need service reply back, robots select
one and then navigate to the location

Energy concern in WSN

Low energy design
Energy harvesting
Using mobile nodes
Energy transference
Player/Stage

Energy transference
-energy transference for sensornets[11]
energy availability must be decoupled form sensornet operation

Energy relay(with harvesting capabilities) to deliver energy to

energy consumers.
Enable energy to be treated as a network wide, exchangeable
and route-able commodity.

Player/Stage
Player is a language and platform
independent network server for robot
control. Player runs on a machine that is
physically connected to a collection of devices
and offers a TCP socket interface to clients
control program.[12]
Stage simulates a population mobile
robots in a 2D environment.

References
[1]AMAN KANSAL, JASON HSU, SADAF ZAHEDI, and MANI B. SRIVASTAVA, Power
Management in Energy Harvesting Sensor Networks, ACM Transactions on Embedded
Computing Systems, Vol. 6, No. 4, Article 32, 2007.
[2]Maintaining Coverage with Energy-Aware Protocol without Knowing Exact Positions in
Wireless Sensor Networks
[3]Kemal Akkaya *, Mohamed Younis, A survey on routing protocols for wireless sensor
networks, Ad Hoc Networks 3 (2005) 325349
[4]Algorith, Ali, M., Al-Hashimi, B., Recas, J. and Atienza,D, Evaluation and Design
Exploration of Solar Harvested-Energy Prediction
[5]Clemens Moser, Jian-Jia Chen, Lothar Thiele, Power Management in Energy Harvesting
Embedded Systems with Discrete Service Levels
[6]Dong Kun Noh, Lili Wang, Yong Yang, Hieu Khac Le, and Tarek Abdelzaher, Minimum
Variance Energy Allocation for a Solar-Powered Sensor System
[7]Analysis, Comparison, and Optimization of Routing Protocols for Energy Harvesting
Wireless Sensor Networks

[8]Ming Ma, Yuanyuan YangSenCar: An Energy-Efficient Data Gathering Mechanism

for Large-Scale Multihop Sensor Networks,IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL
AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS,VOL. 18,NO. 10, OCTOBER 2007
[9]JIAN MA, CANFENG CHEN AND JYRI P. SALOMAA,mWSN for Large Scale Mobile
Sensing,Journal of Signal Processing Systems 51, 195206, 2008
[10]O. Tekdas, J.H. Lim, A. Terzis, and V. Isler. Using Mobile Robots to Harvest Data from
Sensor Fields. IEEE Wireless Communications, 2008
[11]Affan A. Syed Young Cho,Energy Transference for Sensornets,SenSys10
[12]Brian Gerkey, Richard T. Vaughan and Andrew Howard. "The Player/Stage Project: Tools
for Multi-Robot and Distributed Sensor Systems". In Proceedings of the 11th International
Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR 2003)
[13]Winston K.G. Seah, Zhi Ang Eu and Hwee-Pink Tan. Wireless Sensor Networks
Powered by Ambient Energy Harvesting (WSN-HEAP) Survey and Challenges,
2009
[14]Onur Tekdas, Nikhil Karnad, and Volkan Isler, Efficient Strategies for Collecting
Data from Wireless Sensor Network Nodes using Mobile Robots,ISRR09