Issues on low power routing for wireless sensor networks

The present paper presents considerations on using a low power routing solution for prolonging the battery life for motes within a wireless sensor network (WSN) without affecting the network connectivity. The solution applies for the cases when, the distances between motes and base stations are over the mote´s communication range, and motes located between sinks and base station are commonly used both as regular motes and repeaters. This diminishes their energetic autonomy and increases lifecycle maintenance costs. The power constraint has a great impact on the functioning of wireless sensor networks; the battery life makes the data communication very high-priced and restricts the amount of transferred data. A quantitative study case is performed considering a wide-area WSN functioning in different modes..