Minimizing the total energy consumption in wireless sensor networks
Event details
| Date | 22.06.2011 |
| Hour | 10:00 |
| Speaker | Prof. Heinrich Meyr, Aachen |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
One of the most compelling challenges of the next decade is expanding the data networks into the end-user´s data collection and monitoring devices. A typical wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a sensor, a digital controller, an information processing unit and a wireless transceiver. The energy consumption of the sensor node must be minimized since the node frequently sustains itself on energy harvested from the environment. In case of battery powered devices one must eliminate frequent battery replacement. The energy equation of a WSN contains various terms. Energy is consumed by the sensor, information compressing in the sensor and communication of data in the network. Minimization of the total energy to transmit information from source to destination is a trade-off between the conflicting goals of communication performance and energy consumption of the various contributors to the energy equation. For example, minimizing the computation energy for information compressing at the node requires a larger data rate resulting in a larger energy per transmitted information bit. Traditionally, the communication engineer is concerned with the tradeoff between transmit energy efficiency measured by the signal-to- noise ratio and spectral efficiency measured in bit/sHz to achieve a specified communication performance. Processing energy of the transceiver is neglected in the classical communication theory. This view is too restrictive for our purposes. The metric to be minimized in a WSN is the energy per information bit (pJ/bit) required to transmit an information bit from source to destination. This metric is independent of the architecture of the network, of its protocol, transmission methods and transceiver implementation and, thus, allows comparing competing designs. In this lecture we will first introduce the design space of a WSN. We will then focus on the communication aspects and discuss in some detail the trade-offs between communication performance, spectral efficiency and the efficiency of the combined processing and transmit energy. We will discuss transceiver concepts and their practical implementations taking into account issue such as synchronization, wake-up protocols etc.
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Practical information
- General public
- Free