Experimental investigation of the energy consumption for wireless sensor network with centralized data collection scheme

Energy consumption minimization onWSN (wireless sensors network) is an open challenge. WSN is typically composed by an elevated number of battery powered devices that cooperate to forward data to a rendezvous point. In order to maximize network lifetime many protocols implement sleeps policy and try to reduce devices idle times. Unfortunately a trade off between energy requirements and data delivery delays exist and have to be carefully considered during communication protocol developments. In fact when the attention is moved to network implementation aspects, hardware's details became extremely important. The exact knowledge of device energy requirements during normal protocol operations is essential in order to optimize the energy saving strategies. With this conviction in mind, this work characterize through a campaign of measures the energy requirements of a sensor network based on EyesIFXv2.0 sensor nodes. In order to obtain a generalizable result, we have focused our attention on a simple centralized scheme and we have investigated traffic influences on the devices mean energy consumptions. Two important aspects of WSN has considered: Firstly we focused our attention on delay introduced by collision avoidance mechanism on data collections into a geographic area. Secondly we moved our interest on devices power consumption requirements under different network traffic conditions.