Real Time communication with Power Adaptation (RTPA) in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

Wireless sensor network (WSN) has become a hot research area due to its important applications in military, health, home and other commercial areas. WSN is referred to as a group of sensors and base station(s) linked by wireless medium to perform sensing and decision-making tasks. In WSN, sensors gather information about the physical world while base station takes decisions and then perform appropriate actions upon the environment, which allows a user to effectively sense and monitor from a distance. Sensor nodes are low-cost, low-power, multi-functional devices that communicate untethered in short distances [1]. This paper proposes Real Time communication with Power Adaptation (RTPA), a novel real time routing scheme that provides efficient power consumption and the desired quality of service (QoS) in WSN. A key advantage of RTPA is that it can deliver packets within their end-to-end deadlines, while minimizing the network power consumption by adapting the transmission power based on the timing requirements of the workload and link quality between the source and destination. RTPA uses the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC and physical layers standard. IEEE 802.15.4 is a new standard uniquely designed for low rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs). It targets low data rate, low power consumption and low cost wireless networking, and offers device level wireless connectivity.