Energy consumption savings in ZigBee-based WSN adjusting power transmission at application layer

This paper proposes a transmission power management algorithm based on link quality parameter to obtain savings in node energy consumption. The radio operation is the most power consuming task in a wireless node network; therefore the proposed algorithm tries to determine the optimum transmission power level to use only the required energy. A new decision index is defined based on link quality information to determine the optimum transmission power level. Experimental data of node consumption and link quality is used to evaluate the energy efficiency of the proposed algorithm. In addition, the energy efficiency of the algorithm is also estimated using a proposed mathematical model, independent of the hardware platform used. Furthermore, the proposed power savings algorithm is implemented at application layer without requiring any physical or MAC layers modifications.