Real-Time Support and Energy Efficiency In Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: Wireless sensors nodes are made up of small electronic devices which are capable of sensing, computing and transmitting data from harsh physical environments like a surveillance field. These sensor nodes majorly depend on batteries for energy, which get depleted at a faster rate because of the computation and communication operations they have to perform. Communication protocols can be designed to make efficient utilization of energy resources of a sensor node and to obtain real time functionality. A set of previously reported routing and MAC (Medium Access Control) layer protocols has abilities to achieve energy efficiency and supports real-time functionality. A detailed study of these protocols has been carried out and comparison tables give an overview of the protocol’s performance on some factors like latency, scalability and energy awareness. Conclusions have been drawn using the comparison table parameters of how the protocol performs when utilized for a surveillance application and what kind of tradeoff they show. The conclusions and tabular information drawn here are from our theoretical analysis of protocols referred from journals; there is no simulation work done in this thesis.