An energy-efficient node for wireless sensor networks using software radio

For the applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN) randomly deployed in the complicated and time-varying environment, the most important challenge is to design sensor networks that require long system lifetimes and some metrics for the quality of service (QoS). To design such sensor networks, we propose a sensor node with dual-processor framework which is based on the direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS). The sensor node meets the requirement of communication's performance in the time-varying environment and works in a low power mode. Considering the parameters of the underlying hardware and physical layer which can be used at all levels of the hierarchy, we offer a more suitable platform for test and application of wireless sensor networks. We also show how to reduce energy consumption of non-ideal hardware and satisfy the communication capability through dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) and software radio (SR) design.