A Power Control Mechanism for Sensor Node Based on Dynamic Programming

Reducing energy consumption is one of the key challenges in sensor networks. Lots of researches have tried to turn the nodes off when not needed to reduce energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a mechanism which dynamically turns on/off different components of the node to conserve energy while maintaining required performance. We model power management problem in a sensor node as an average reward MDP and solve it using dynamic programming. We prove that the MDP is communicating and we use communicating policy iteration algorithm to compute the optimal policy. Simulation results show our approach conserves more energy than always on policy while reaches to the same amount of utility.