Development of a wireless sensor network system for power constrained applications

This paper presents an advanced multihop wireless sensor network testbed developed to support a range of distributed computing, control, and communications applications. The testbed uses low cost sensor nodes based upon the IEEE802.15.4 standard to create distributed sensor networks. This paper also introduces simple packet scheduling and routing protocols which enable a wireless sensor network to route information packets using minimum energy, thus prolonging the network's operational lifetime. The proposed routing protocol is synchronised with the MAC sleep cycle to minimise the total energy used to transmit a packet in a multihop network. This proposal presents some initial energy efficiency performance figures.