Energy efficiency strategy for a general real-time wireless sensor platform

The energy constraint is still a common issue for the practical application of wireless sensors, since they are usually powered by batteries which limit their lifetime. In this paper, a practical compound energy efficiency strategy is proposed and realized in the implementation of a real time wireless sensor platform. The platform is intended for wireless structural monitoring applications and consists of three parts, wireless sensing unit, base station and data acquisition and configuration software running in a computer within the Matlab environment. The high energy efficiency of the wireless sensor platform is achieved by a proposed adaptive radio transmission power control algorithm, and some straightforward methods, including adopting low power ICs and high efficient power management circuits, low duty cycle radio polling and switching off radio between two adjacent data packets' transmission. The adaptive transmission power control algorithm is based on the statistical average of the path loss estimations using a moving average filter. The algorithm is implemented in the wireless node and relies on the received signal strength feedback piggybacked in the ACK packet from the base station node to estimate the path loss. Therefore, it does not need any control packet overheads. Several experiments are carried out to investigate the link quality of radio channels, validate and evaluate the proposed adaptive transmission power control algorithm, including static and dynamic experiments.