Efficient Power Utilization Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks – A Survey

Micro-sensor networks are widely deployed sensor network in typical geographical areas where human intervention is almost impossible. A WSN is a collection of several small energy limited sensors. These devices are autonomous devices performs the job of data collection and forwarding it to the central node called sink node. The observed data can travel through multiple paths to reach sink node. Sink node performs the task of data fusion to determine a meaningful output. The micro sensors use battery power supply to achieve this goal. The considerable part here is to utilize that limited power supply for a longer time period. Although latest developments in the area of electronics has enabled the development of lowcost and low power sensor networks, still researchers are developing protocols by different approaches to optimize power utilization for such tiny micro-sensors. This paper studies various approaches used by researchers to enhance power utilization.