Management of Energy in Wireless Sensor Networks with Energy-Starving Sensors

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks provide wide - scale connectivity to the physical world at a lower cost than that of the wired alternative. The complete exploitation of this technology is prevented by various energy factors, which serves as a major barrier. Nodes are powered by various energy sources such as batteries, super capacitors with a limited lifetime or by harvesting energy from the external environment. This m eans that this limited energy source should be effectively and judiciously utilized. Efficient management of energy is a vital requirement for the optimal design of a wireless sensor network. Most of the literatures propose various energy management strat egies, under the assumption that data acquisition consumes significantly less energy than their transmission. But this assumption does not sound good in a number of practical scenarios, where the power consumption for the sensing activity may be greater t han that of radio terminal. So energy management schemes should give criteria for the efficient and effective use of energy in energy - starving sensors. In this paper, we survey various methodologies for the effic ient management of energy in Energy – S tarvi ng sensors