An Analysis of Energy Efficient Collector Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent advances in environmental energy harvesting technologies have provided great potentials for traditional battery-powered sensor networks to achieve perpetual operations. Due to dynamics from the temporal profiles of ambient energy sources, most of the studies so far have focused on designing and optimizing energy management schemes on single sensor node, Efficient use of the limited energy resources of wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes is critically important to support these advances, and application of topology control methods will have a profound impact on energy efficiency and hence battery lifetime. We focus on the energy efficiency issue and present a comprehensive study of topology control techniques for extending the lifetime of battery powered WSNs. First, we review the significant topology control algorithms to provide insights into how energy efficiency is achieved by design. Further, these algorithms are classified according to the energy conservation approach they adopt, and evaluated by the trade-offs they offer to aid designers in selecting a technique that best suits their applications. Since the concept of “network lifetime” is widely used for assessing the algorithms' performance, we highlight various definitions of the term and discuss their merits and drawbacks.