Adaptive Power Control Scheme for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the major factors that affects the performance of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is its limited battery capacity. Mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSN) are just like WSN except either sensor nodes or sink or both can move. Similar to WSN nodes, in MWSN have limited power resources, so network life depends on battery power consumption. Most of the energy consumed by the network is when transmitting or exchange of control information and data is performed. There are different techniques presented by the researchers to conserve energy like topology control, power management, and data driven methods, etc. In this paper, an adaptive power control strategy for conserving energy in MWSN is presented. The proposed scheme uses variable transmission power to reduce energy usage in the transmission of data and control packets and estimates the energy consumed in unicast and broadcast communication of data and control packets. Sensor nodes adjust their transmission power level at every stage of communication which not only reduces the energy utilization by the sensor nodes but also increases data reception at the sink. This is achieved by limiting unnecessary transmissions within sensing regions where they are not intended to reach or exist.