A heuristic approach for component selection of low power micro sensor nodes based on simple energy model

Critical characteristics of wireless sensor networks, as being autonomous and comprising small or miniature devices are achieved at the expense of very strict available energy related limitations. The energy constraint in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) advocates the design and use of low power components in sensor nodes. In this paper, a simple energy model for the node autonomy estimation has been developed. The energy model implemented in this paper takes into account the pulsed discharge battery model rather than continuous discharge assumptions for node autonomy, presented in earlier works. The wake up and sleep modes have been modeled separately which has not been done in the earlier models developed so far. Comparison between hardware for nodes has been made on the basis of node autonomy calculated from the simple energy model developed in this paper.