Introduction

• Building a wireless sensor network requires the

constituting nodes to be developed. These nodes have
to meet the requirements from a given application.
They have to be small, cheap, energy efficient,
equipped with the right sensors, memory resources
and sufficient communication facilities. The hardware
components of the functioning node are explained as
follows.

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 Overview of Sensor Node
• A basic sensor node comprises five main components
are shown in the Figure.
• Controller: To process all relevant data
• Memory: To store programs and intermediate data.
• Sensors and actuators: Actual interface to the physical
world to observe or control physical parameters of the
environment.
• Communication: Device for sending and receiving
information over a wireless channel
• Power supply: Some form of batteries necessary to
provide energy and some form of recharging by
obtaining energy from the environment as well.
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Fig 8 / Basic Components of a Sensor Node

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 Controllers
• The controller is the core of a wireless sensor node.
• It is the Central Processing Unit (CPU) of the node
• It collects data from sensors, processes this data,
receives data from other sensor nodes, and decides on
the actuator’s behavior.
• It has to execute various programs, ranging from time-
critical signal processing and communication protocols
to application programs.
• Such a variety of processing tasks can be performed on
various controller architectures, representing trade-offs
between flexibility, performance, energy efficiency, and
costs.
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• Microcontrollers are suitable for WSNs since they can
reduce their power consumption by going into sleep
states where only parts of the controller are active.
• One of the main differences to general-purpose
systems is that microcontroller-based systems do not
include a memory management unit – for example,
protected or virtual memory is difficult.
• In a wireless sensor node, DSP can be used to process
incoming data. But the advantages of a DSP are not
required in a WSN node and they are usually not used.
• Another option for the controller is to use Field-
Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) or Application-
Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) instead of
microcontrollers. 30
• An FPGA can be reprogrammed in the field to adapt to
a changing set of requirements , but this can take time
and energy.
• An ASIC is a specialized processor, designed for a given
application such as high-speed routers and switches.
• The typical trade-off here is loss of flexibility in return
for a considerably better energy efficiency and
performance.

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 Memory
• There is a need for Random Access Memory (RAM) to
store intermediate sensor readings, packets from other
nodes etc.
• RAM is fast, but it loses its contents if power supply is
interrupted.
• The program code can be stored in Read-Only Memory
(ROM) or in Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-
Only Memory (EEPROM) or flash memory.
• Flash memory can also serve as intermediate storage of
data when the power supply goes off for some time.
• The long read and write access delays of flash memory
should be taken into account as well as the high
required energy.
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 Communication Module
1. Choice of transmission medium
• The first choice is the transmission medium and usual
choices include radio frequencies, optical
communication, and ultrasound.
• Radio Frequency (RF)-based communication is vital
requirement of most WSN applications.
• It provides long range and high data rates, acceptable
error rates at reasonable energy expenditure, and does
not require line of sight between sender and receiver.
• For a practical wireless, RF-based system, the carrier
frequency has to be carefully chosen. The wireless
sensor networks use communication frequencies
between about 433 MHz and 2.4 GHz.
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 2. Transceivers
• For actual communication, both a transmitter and a
receiver are required in a sensor node to convert a bit
stream coming from a microcontroller and convert them
to and from radio waves. Such combined devices are
called transceivers.
• Usually, half-duplex operation is realized since
transmitting and receiving at the same time on a
wireless medium is impractical in most cases. A range of
low-cost transceivers is available that incorporate all the
circuitry required for transmitting and receiving,
modulation, demodulation, amplifiers, filters, mixers
etc..
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 Sensors & Actuators
• Sensors can be categorized into the following three
categories -
1. Passive Omni-directional sensors:
• They can measure a physical quantity at the point of
the sensor node without manipulating the environment
by active probing. They obtain the energy directly from
the environment – energy is only needed to amplify
their analog signal. There is no notion of “direction in
these measurements. Typical examples include
thermometer, light sensors, vibration, microphones,
humidity, chemical sensors etc

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2. Passive narrow-beam sensors: They are passive but
have a well-defined notion of direction of
measurement. A typical example is a camera, which
can “take measurements” in a given direction, but has
to be rotated if need be.
3. Active sensors: They probe the environment, for
example, a sonar or radar sensor or some types of
seismic sensors, which generate shock waves by small
explosions.

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 Power Supply of Sensor Nodes
1. Traditional batteries
• The power source of a sensor node is a battery, either
non-rechargeable (primary batteries) or, if an energy
scavenging device is present on the node, also
rechargeable (secondary batteries).
• In some form or other, batteries are electro-chemical
stores for energy – the chemicals being the main
determining factor of battery technology.

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 2. Energy scavenging
• Some of the unconventional energy sources like fuel
cells, micro heat engines and radioactivity – convert
energy from stored secondary form into electricity in a
easy way than a normal battery would do.
• The entire energy supply is stored on the node itself –
once the fuel supply is exhausted, the node fails.
• The energy from a node’s environment must be tapped
into and made available to the node – energy
scavenging should take place.

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3. Photo-voltaics
The solar cells can be used to power sensor nodes. The
available power depends on whether nodes are used
outdoors or indoors, and on time of day. The resulting
power ranges between 10 mW/cm2 indoors and 15
mW/cm2 outdoors. Single cells achieve a fairly stable
output voltage of about 0.6 V. Hence, solar cells are
used to recharge secondary batteries.
4. Temperature gradients
Differences in temperature can be directly converted to
electrical energy. Theoretically, even small difference
for example, 5 K can produce considerable power, but
practical devices fall very short of theoretical upper
limits.
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5. Vibrations
Walls or windows in buildings are resonating with cars
or trucks passing in the streets, machinery often has
low- frequency vibrations, ventilations also cause it,
and so on. The available energy depends on amplitude
and frequency of the vibration and ranges between 0.1
mW/cm3 and 10, 000 mW/cm3 for some extreme
cases.

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 Energy supply for a sensor node is at a premium
 Batteries have small capacity, and recharging by energy
scavenging is complicated and volatile.
 Hence, the energy consumption of a sensor node must
be tightly controlled.
 The main consumers of energy are the controller, the
radio front ends, to some degree the memory, and,
depending on the type, the sensors.
 The components involved in energy consumption are:

Operation states with different power consumption

Microcontroller energy consumption
Memory

Radio transceivers
Relationship between computation and communication
Power consumption of sensors and actuators
 One important contribution to reduce power
consumption of these components comes from chip-
level and lower technologies
 Designing low-power chips is the best starting point for
an energy-efficient sensor node
 Introducing and using multiple states of operation with
reduced energy consumption in return for reduced
functionality is the core technique for energy-efficient
wireless sensor node
 Embedded controllers commonly implement the concept of multiple
operational states
 The Intel Strong ARM provides three sleep modes:

▪ Normal mode : All parts of the processor are fully powered. Power
consumption is up to 400 mW.

▪ Idle Mode: Clocks to the CPU are stopped; clocks that pertain to peripherals
are active. Any interrupt will cause return to normal mode. Power
consumption is up to 100 mW.

▪ Sleep Mode : Only the real-time clock remains active. Wakeup occurs after a
timer interrupt and takes up to 160 ms. Power consumption is up 50 μW
 The most relevant kinds of memory are

 on- chip memory of a microcontroller and

 FLASH memory – off-chip RAM is rarely if ever used.

 In fact, the power needed to drive on-chip memory is usually

included in the power consumption numbers given for the

controllers.

 Hence, the most relevant part is FLASH memory – in fact, the

construction and usage of FLASH memory can heavily influence

node lifetime.
 The relevant metrics are the read and write times and

energy consumption.

 All this information is readily available from manufacturers’ data

sheets and do vary depending on several factors

 Read times and read energy consumption tend to be quite similar

between different types of FLASH memory

 Writing is somewhat more complicated, as it depends on the

granularity with which data can be accessed

 A radio transceiver has essentially two tasks:

 transmitting and receiving data between a pair of nodes.

 Similar to microcontrollers, radio transceivers can operate in different modes, the

simplest ones are being turned on or turned off.

 To accommodate the necessary low total energy consumption, the transceivers

should be turned off most of the time and only be activated when necessary – they

work at a low duty cycle. But this incurs additional complexity, time and power

overhead that has to be taken into account.

 To understand the energy consumption behavior of radio transceivers and their

impact on the protocol design, models for the energy consumption per bit for both

sending and receiving are required.

 In principle, the energy consumed by a transmitter is due to two sources:

 one part is due to RF signal generation, which mostly depends

on chosen modulation and target distance and hence on the
transmission power radiated by the antenna.

 A second part is due to electronic components necessary for

frequency synthesis, frequency conversion, filters, and so on.
 Similar to the transmitter, the receiver can be either turned off or turned
on. While being turned on, it can either actively receive a packet or can
be idle, observing the channel and ready to receive. Evidently, the power
consumption while it is turned off is negligible. Even the difference
between idling and actually receiving is very small and can, for most
purposes, be assumed to be zero
 Computing a single instruction on a microcontroller requires about 1 nJ.

 Also, 1 nJ about suffices to take a single sample in a radio transceiver;

Bluetooth transceivers could be expected to require roughly 100 nJ to

transmit a single bit

 For other hardware, the ratio of the energy consumption to send one bit

compared to computing a single instruction is between 1500 to 2700 for

Rockwell WINS nodes, between 220 to 2900 for MEDUSA II nodes, and

about 1400 for WINS NG 2.0 node for the RFM TR1000 radio transceiver,

1 μJ to transmit a single bit and 0.5 μJ to receive one; their processor

takes about 8 nJ per instruction

 This results in a (actually quite good) ratio of about 190 for communication
to computation costs. In a slightly different perspective,
communicating 1 kB of data over 100 m consumes roughly the same
amount of energy as computing three million instructions. It give some
more numbers for specific applications Disregarding the details, it is
clear that communication is a considerably more expensive undertaking
than computation. Still, energy required for computation cannot be simply
ignored; depending on the computational task, it is usually still smaller
than the energy for communication, but still noticeable.
 This basic observation motivates a number of
approaches and design decisions for the networking
architecture of wireless sensor networks. The core idea is
to invest into computation within the network whenever
possible to safe on communication costs, leading to
the notion of in-network processing and aggregation.
 Providing any guidelines about the power consumption of
the actual sensors and actuators is next to impossible
because of the wide diversity of these devices.
 For example, passive light or temperature sensors – the
power consumption can perhaps be ignored in comparison
to other devices on a wireless node report a power
consumption of 0.6 to 1 mA for a temperature sensor