Energy saving in pervasive wireless sensor networks

Embedded networks of wireless sensor nodes are representatives of pervasive computing. They reflect the pervasive computing proactive goal, "all the time everywhere". Mostly, they are battery operated. Due to the embedded nature of sensor nodes, power supply and its management remain an active challenge for scientists and engineers. Energy utilized in these nodes can be managed and saved at different layers of the network design. Network layer, responsible to route the data, has also a big contribution in saving the energy. In this paper, we discuss an application of wireless sensor networks that senses the environment pervasively. For this application we introduce a routing algorithm for the network layer. We present an innovative cross-layer design of network layer and medium access layer that carries energy saving technique for pervasive wireless sensor networks. This technique includes the sleep mode of radio and microcontroller of the nodes. We use research platform comprised of mica2 motes. We present results of our experiments by implementing temperature sensing application that includes our routing algorithm and energy saving technique. Results show 40 times reduction in average energy utilized per node. This increases the life time of pervasive wireless sensor network. For cross verification we also use simulators, TOSSIM and PowerTOSSIM