Energy Efficient Hardware and Improved Cluster-Tree Topology for Lifetime Prolongation in ZigBee Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, building energy-efficient systems is one of the major challenges. In such networks, nodes are usually supplied by low power and small batteries. Many factors are involved in the energy consumption, and this issue may be considered as a cross-layer problem, from the hardware architecture to the application layer. This paper aims at presenting a hybrid solution for sensor networks based on two main aspects. The first one is the hardware architecture, where we present a prototype of a sensor node we designed. This node proved its efficiency in terms of energy consumption. The second aspect is related to the topology construction and presents a new topology control algorithm based on graph computing. Thus, our system consists of a real indoor application for temperature and humidity monitoring, applicable to home automation or industrial monitoring. We performed the experiments using a set of sensor nodes deployed over a building and proved the efficiency of the system in terms of energy consumption, network lifetime and data delivery.