An Index-Based Approach for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor nodes have significant power constraints (battery life). Thus, power-aware approaches must be employed to prolong the network lifetime. However, most of the literature considers only routing-based approaches to prolong it. In this paper, we propose an index-based approach that provides a new way for reducing the energy consumption. The idea behind this new proposed approach is having an index for each possible value for a sensed reading. The index length will have much less length than the reading if the possible values for the sensed reading are limited. In this case, sending the corresponding index for a reading instead of the reading itself will result in decreasing the size of the submitted packet and therefore reducing the consumed energy. The experimental results show that our approach reduces both the total energy consumption and total elapsed time in the case the number of the possible different values for each sensed reading is up to 32,768 (215) and the size of each reading is 16 bits (MICA Motes).