Energy-efficiency in wireless sensor networks

In this thesis, we propose new strategies for energy conservation in wireless sensor networks, so that the operational time of these networks can be extended. The work can be divided into two main focus area, namely general wireless sensor networks, and healthcareoriented wearable sensor networks. In the first part of this thesis we provide a comprehensive survey of the existing energy-efficient mechanisms. Then, we propose two new solutions: the first one optimizes the displacement of a mobile base station as well as buffer usage and data routing at sensor nodes; the second one optimizes the deployment of wireless chargers in the network to satisfy the energy demand of the sensors. The second part of this thesis is dedicated to healthcare application where wearable sensors are used to remotely supervise a patient. We begin with a state-of-the-art of the energy-efficient techniques existing in the literature. We then introduce a new energy-efficient architecture that allows to optimize the lifetime of both the sensor and the base station. This is a context-aware solution that takes into consideration heterogeneous devices. Our results show that the lifetime of the sensor networks can be extended using the proposed strategies. All the results obtained are supported by numerical experiments and extensive simulations.