Residual Energy Monitoring in WirelessSensor Networks

Abstract: Since wireless sensor networks are energy constrained, introducing a method that facilitates the efficient use of the available energy in each node is a fundamental design issue. In this work, a mechanism to monitor the residual energy of sensor networks is proposed. The information about the residual energy of each sensor node in the network is saved in a special node called monitoring node. This information can be used as input to other applications to prolong the network lifetime. Each sensor node in the network uses the proposed prediction-based model to forecast its energy consumption rate. The model's performance is measured based on the number of energy packets sent to the monitoring node for various thresholds (prediction errors). The simulation results showed that reducing the threshold will produce more accurate projection of the residual energy of each node in the monitoring node. However, as the threshold is further decreased the number of energy packets sent to the monitoring node grows significantly. This incurs higher energy map construction cost on the network in terms of energy and bandwidth. The simulation results also showed the tradeoff between increasing the accuracy of the prediction model and reducing the cost of energy map construction.