Mamta Agiwal and Kashif Ahmed, CMRIT, India

Much research on wireless networks have focused on the power consumption of the wireless nodes, while at the same time how to acquire power from ambient environment is another direction to extend the battery lifetime. Though, mostly extending the lifetime of WSNs rely on making the electronic circuitry power efficient by incorporating advances in node architecture, transceivers, access protocols and on finite energy sources like batteries. In contrast, WSNs Powered by Ambient Energy Harvesting can also prove to be useful and economical in the long-term as they can operate for very long periods of time until hardware failure, because ambient energy can be harvested from the environment perpetually. Although cellular networks account for a rather small share of energy use, lowering their energy consumption appears beneficial from an economical perspective. In the strive for lessening of the environmental impact of the information and communication industry, energy consumption of communication networks has recently received increased attention. The paper discusses the various techniques for increasing the life of WSNs.

DVS, Sensor Node Architecture, Medium Access Protocols, Ultracapacitors, RF Transceivers