Power Management Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks- A Survey

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an ad-hoc network which has received tremendous attention in recent years because of the development of sensor devices, as well as wireless communication technologies. WSNs, are large scale networks of small embedded devices, each with sensing, computation and communication capabilities. Developments in last about two decades, implementation of low power micro-controllers based wireless sensors have been increased rapidly to solve many real life problems like traffic monitoring, patient monitoring, battlefield surveillance. Sensing, computations, communication are routines of wireless sensor networks which consume much power of these low powered sensor nodes. Since nodes have small battery with a limited life, power management is essential to be addressed to make sensors work for a long time. Hence these power hungry sensors are to be addressed by an effective and efficient power management scheme. This paper aims at the introduction of wireless sensor network, power issues associated with them and techniques for power management in WSN. Index Terms Wireless, sensor, power, monitoring, micro-controllers. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________