Design and realization of an intelligent sensor node with its application in energy-aware WSNs

Energy consumption remains a major obstacle for full deployment and exploitation of wireless sensor network technology nowadays. This paper presents design and realization of an intelligent sensor node, which can help to construct energy-aware wireless sensor networks (WSNs). An energy-efficient scheme, which aims at minimizing communication energy of the WSN in two aspects: the node level and the network level, is proposed. To minimize the transmission energy consumption of a sensor node, the distance between the transmitter and the receiver is estimated before available transmission, and then the lowest transmission power needed to transmit the measurement data is calculated and determined. Furthermore, the energy saving can be achieved through estimating the energy consumption within the whole network under different schemes, and then choosing the most energy-efficient one.