Power Management in Wireless Sensor Networks with High-Consuming Sensors

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), usually batterypowered, thus very energy-constrained, present energy efficiency as the main challenge. To reduce the overall energy consumption of the network, research community has been tackling power management (PM) techniques on different levels — sensing, communication, computation and energy harvesting. Usually in WSNs the communication consumes most of the energy. But recently wireless sensor nodes are introduced that comprise also energy-consuming sensors, apart from the ‘traditional’ ones like temperature, air pressure and humidity sensors. Therefore, besides the well explored PM techniques on the transceiver activity and wireless transmission, there is a necessity to introduce also the PM on the sensing unit, that reduces the power consumption of the power-hungry sensors. This paper presents state-of-theart of the most important PM techniques both for transceiver and sensor activity, focusing on the contextand energy-aware multimodal heterogeneous WSNs with energy consuming sensors, designed for smart video surveillance and smart gas detection.