Power Management in Wireless Sensor Networks by Enhancing the Thermo-Electric Properties of Their Circuitries

With the proliferation of portable computing platforms and devices, wireless networks have received more and more attention as a means of data communication among portable devices. It has long been recognized that energy conservation usually comes at the cost of degraded performance such as longer delay and lower throughput in stand-alone systems and communication networks. Power conservation and power management must be taken into account at all levels of the sensor networks system hierarchy. Even though various power management schemes such as Dynamic Power Management systems (DPMs), application aware power management systems have been implemented, the results are not yet satisfactory. Its due to the reason that the technologies adopted till now does not concentrate on the hardware electrical parameters such as Power and thermo-electric properties of the materials in the network which are at the forefront of concerns facing modern computing systems. Here it is proposed to improve the thermoelectric properties of the electrical components by introducing nanostructures into Bi₂Te₃ thin films from which the sensor¿s hardware components can be designed. Good thermoelectric materials require an unusual combination of electrical and thermal properties, i.e. high See beck coefficient (S), low electrical resistivity (¿) and low total thermal conductivity (¿), which defines dimensionless figure of merit (ZT). Recently, with developing nanofabrication technology, further improvement of S has been actualized by using a quantum effect.