More power-efficient data gathering trees for wireless sensor networks

Power efficiency is very important in wireless sensor networks because the sensors typically run on batteries and long lifetime is highly desirable. In this research the use of power transmission control in a data gathering tree topology for wireless sensor networks was evaluated. The Mica2 was used as the research platform for this research. With the aid of experimental data, as reported in [1] and some further experiments, an algorithm was designed for variable transmission power of the nodes. The power adjustments were designed to minimize transmission power without unduly jeopardizing packet error rates at the receivers. This algorithm was tested in different comparison studies to evaluate the effectiveness of using variable transmission control in wireless sensor networks. Through our comparison studies we have gathered that the use of variable transmission control is able to give energy savings of up to 33.4% under certain conditions.