Different Energy Saving Schemes in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are one of the very active research area. They have many applications like military, health care, environmental monitoring and industrial monitoring. The sensor nodes have limited energy source. Since in many cases the nodes are deployed in unreachable areas, hence recharging or replacing the battery of the sensor nodes is not an option. Therefore, one must employ techniques to conserve the energy by reducing the energy consumption by the nodes. In this paper, we discuss about the different energy saving schemes investigated by different research community in WSNs to reduce the energy consumption of the nodes and thereby improving the lifetime of the overall network. Energy saving protocols such as duty cycle, energy efficient routing, energy efficient medium access control (MAC), data aggregation, cross layer design and error control code (ECC) are discussed. Sleep/wake up method is adopted by the duty cycle approach to reduce the active time of the nodes and conserve their energy. The routing and MAC protocols use suitable energy efficient algorithms for saving energy. The data aggregation aims to save energy by reducing the number of transmissions. On the other side, cross layer approach looks for a cross layer optimization solution to improve the energy efficiency of the network. ECC reduces energy consumption by virtue of coding gain it offers which allows lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to achieve the same bit error rate (BER) as an uncoded system. Some techniques such as use of directional antennas, topology control and transmission power control which have been widely investigated for other ad-hoc networks for energy conservation are also discussed in brief in this paper.