A study of energy consumption and reliability in a multi-hop sensor network

For a moderate-size, multi-hop, sensor network, we present experimental measurements of radio energy consumption and packet reliability. We categorize the energy measurements by energy consumed in each radio state and for each traffic type. Packet reliability results are presented from a network and link perspective, whereas prior work only considered the former. We introduce a novel technique of application-aware radio duty cycling called on-demand spatial TDMA. When compared to the non-cycling case, this technique can achieve greater than an order of magnitude reduction in idle energy consumption, while not sacrificing reliability. We show end-to-end packet loss rates as low as 0.04 when averaged over the network. Even with substantial idle energy savings, we identify radio idling as the dominate energy consumer and overhearing as the dominate traffic type.

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