Reducing Energy Consumption of Wireless Sensor Networks through Processor Optimizations

When the environmental conditions are stable, a typical Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) application may sense and process very similar or constant data values for long durations. This is a common behavior of WSN nodes that can be exploited for reducing their power consumption. This study combines two orthogonal techniques to reduce the energy dissipation of the processor component of the sensor nodes. First, we briefly discuss silent-store filtering MoteCache. Second, we utilize ContentAware Data MAnagement (CADMA) on top of MoteCache architecture to achieve further energy savings and possible performance improvements. The complexity increase introduced by CADMA is also compensated by further complexity reduction in MoteCache architecture. Our optimal configuration reduces the total node energy, and hence increases the node lifetime, by 19.4% on the average across a wide variety of simulated sensor benchmarks. Our complexityaware configuration with a minimum MoteCache size with only four entries not only achieves energy savings up to 16.2% but also performance improvements up to 14%, on the average.