Power Consumption Analysis of TinyOS Dissemination Protocols

ii Declaration I declare that the work described in this dissertation is, except where otherwise stated, entirely my own work and has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this or any other university. I agree that Trinity College Library may lend or copy this dissertation upon request. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Meriel Huggard, for her help in the completion of my dissertation and also for her helpful actions when personal obstacles arose. Thanks go to the NDS class for making this an enjoyable year, and also to Laura for thoroughly and attentively proofreading my thesis. Finally I would like to thank Ricardo Carbajo, both a gentleman and a scholar; I am surprised this man gets any work done with the amount of time he gives to others. v Abstract A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a network that is made up of various dispersed nodes (sensors) that are capable of measuring valuable aspects about their environment. These conditions may range from areas such as location to sound to vibration and there is an ever increasing range of applications being developed in this area. Many applications which have been unfeasible in the past due to limitations such as limited bandwidth, computational requirements and battery life are now able to be researched and developed due to advancements in the area of low power integrated circuits and wireless communications [1]. However these factors still play a large role in the feasibility of applications and using them in the most efficient way is a must in this young technology domain. Limited battery life, processing resources and transmission ranges are characteristics of many wireless environments. These constraints are a key determining factor in all facets of the design of wireless sensor networks and also have an impact on the range of applications that a wireless device may be appropriate for. In this project an analysis of the power consumption of the Dissemination protocols bundled with the TinyOS platform is performed. The aims of this analysis are twofold. Firstly, TinyOS is the operating system upon which Wireless Sensor Networks are developed and these are the Dissemination protocols that are included with it. Developers will be looking to use these supported protocols and it is valuable to have a ranking system and detailed analysis of the power consumption for each of them. Secondly by doing so a generic …